True love is a wonderful myth.

You fall in love, and you have sex, and you get married. Or maybe you get married and then have sex, which is pretty risky, in case you and your mate don't click that way. In either case, you're convinced that you've found the love of your life, the person you want to spend the rest of eternity with, that one special person who was meant for you. Congratulations!

And in the beginning, you're inseparable: you look forward to spending every minute with your Chosen One. You're in love -- true love -- and you can't believe how lucky you are!

But time passes, and you get older. Maybe you have kids. Things about your partner start to bug you. You get too "comfortable" with each other: you and he/she are just pieces of furniture in the space you share. As a friend of mine once said, "I come in and think: there's the sofa, there's the TV, there's Julie. All is right with the world." You kiss good-morning and good-night, but it's just a peck, like you might give to one of your children. Given time, true love has turned, as it most often does, to convenience.

No, of course this isn't how it always goes, but this is the way it goes a lot of the time, with most married folk. You've seen those announcements in the newspaper about a couple celebrating their 50th or 60th anniversary, right? How many of those couples do you suppose actually see that signicant other as their "true love"? How many secretly can't wait until he/she dies? How many have recurring dreams about someone else from a long time ago? (Someone, by the way, who likely wouldn't have turned out to be any better than the current one.)

But back to you: you've been married a while and maybe have kids. You certainly have a routine that involves him/her getting home from work, a meal being prepared, maybe some chat but more likely some TV. Once in a while, you have sex, but it's not the way it was when you first got together. Then a quick peck on the cheek, on the lips, and goodnight.

In the meantime, you still have the same sexual urges you always had -- just not for him/her.
You start to read steamy romance novels, or you watch porn. You find yourself fantasizing about someone at work or at school or at the supermarket or the gym. You feel guilty about it.

What's going on?

Biology. Psychology. Whatever makes us tick. I don't have hard data to back me up, but I strongly suspect that we are not meant to be with only one other person, that there isn't really just that one true love for each of us. I'm afraid the truth is that we are attracted to any number of other people -- of the opposite sex or the same sex, depending -- endlessly, over and over, until we die. At some point, though, we have to choose someone and make the best of it. We look around and pick the best prospect, crossing our fingers, and get on with it.

Love songs have it right and wrong, depending on genre. Most pop songs idealize love as lasting forever, which we all know it doesn't (e.g., half the marriages in the U.S. end in divorce). No, if you want to hear the truth, listen to country and western songs. They're all about lost love and the men and women who let it go, carelessly, and the anguish it produces. You may not like the sound of those songs -- all that twang and that endlessly repetitive melody -- but they do, for the most part, get it right. As humans, we're all about being attracted to one, then to another, and having to drink a lot to reconcile the two. From Hank Williams on, country and western songs have always, much more than pop songs, told the truth. Sad but true. Pop me a beer.

So do be glad if you've found -- and even married -- that Mr. or Ms. Right, that "true love".

But don't fool yourself. Commitment is hard, requiring a lot more than just sexual attraction.
If you're going to make it work, you're going to have to work at it. You'll have to resist the incessant call of nature to find a "better" mate than the one you're with, or just a prettier face, and you're going to have to put up with a lot of bad behavior and irritating personal habits you didn't notice in your mate when you were in the "courtship" and "bonding" phase (i.e., having sex every two hours or so). When that first "rush" wears off, as it will, real commitment begins. And it's serious. That's why we have laws that bind you together. We know you'll be tempted to be selfish, but we, as a society, are going to make it hard for you to act on those temptations. We want it to be hell for you to divorce the one you've chosen as your "true love".

For the sake of the kids.

Friends are the family you create for yourself.

You were born of two parents, and maybe you have brothers and sisters, or maybe you don't. Even if you were an only child, you are still part of a family that came into being without your input. You are the product of sex and bonding and absolute happenstance. Your parents may have wanted you, but they had no idea who they were getting.

With luck, you love your parents and they love you. Maybe you even love and value your brothers and sisters -- and/or your step-brothers/sisters, if your parents divorced and re-married. Maybe you're thankful that you've been granted such a wonderful and supportive family.

However, if you're like most of us, you consider your family a mixed bag. Yes, there are some you would have chosen for yourself, but there are others that you wish had been born into a different family, who would have to deal with them out of your seeing. You admire certain traits of your parents but find others a little short-sighted. If you had your choice of a family, you would include some members of the one you were born into but not others. There are people you've met -- or will meet -- who you wish had been your sister or brother or even a parent.

All of us experience this, and most of us feel guilty about it. If your original family was horribly abusive, then, of course, you should reject them and find friends and mentors who will fill the void. But most of us have families who probably didn't understand us but who didn't mistreat us. But now we're out in the world, encountering people from similar or very different families who are giving us their own -- often surprising -- points of view on growing up. Sometimes it opens our eyes; other times it confirms what we'd thought all along but didn't know that other people thought it, too. Whatever we hear, and however we take it, we become more determined to establish our own identities, absent family influence.

In the end, though, we do have to deal with family. There is some inherent bond built into us that we can't break. If your mother gets sick, or if your father falls off a ladder, or if one of your nieces or nephews graduates from high school, etc., you have to do something: visit, call, send a card, whatever. There is no escape from family, and there shouldn't be. They are who we come from and who we are most like, for better or worse.

But friends are the family you create for yourself.

These are the people who know you best, who met you when you were older and have a better sense of who you are. The you they know is the real you. (The you your family knows may well be way out of date.) If you're really lucky, some of the members of your family are among this select group, and you should count your blessings and don't complain about another thing the rest of your life, okay?

You aren't your parents, and you aren't your kids.

When you were born, your parents were already adults. Okay, maybe they were teenagers -- God forbid! -- but they still had been in the world for a while and had figured out some things and hadn't figured out other things. They had bonded with each other and had you. So you come into the world, an absolutely powerless being, at the mercy of these people you don't know and who don't know you. Whatever they've learned is passed on to you or not, depending on how much they're invested in being parents. At any rate, you grow up and learn about the world in your own way, and then you measure that against what you learned from your parents (or parent if they got divorced). You weigh it all, not sure if you're right about your calculations, and then you make own big decisions -- about school, work, a mate, etc. -- and set about doing the best you can to have a good life.

And then your parents weigh in. If they're nice people, they won't interfere too much: they'll trust that you've absorbed good lessons from them and are making sensible decisions about all these important issues. If they're not so nice -- maybe damaged, maybe just selfish -- they may try to put pressure on you to make decisions that have more to do with them than with you. If they didn't take school seriously, they may advise you to go out and get a job -- without telling you that you'll probably be stuck in low-paying jobs forever. They may even pressure to have kids too early or to spend more time with them because they're bored/lonely/miserable/etc.

Resist it all. They brought you into this world without your permission. You owe them nothing.

You are your own person, created by them but not in debt to them, and you have to decide for yourself what is important in your life. It's scary to think about but very freeing, too.

Okay, so you've chosen a job -- maybe or maybe not your life's work -- and you've also chosen a husband or wife. You find a place to live together and make it a home. You have sex -- a lot more during these first months than you'll ever have again the rest of your lives, so enjoy it -- and you start having children. The natural order of things, and you're right in the midst of it:
congratulations!

So here comes the hard part: You have to remember all that stuff about not owing your parents
anything. Your little one is not going to owe you anything. He or she will grow up, with your nurturing and your help and your advice, to be a totally different person from you or your mate or his or her grandparents. A new person experiencing the world for himself or herself, for better or worse. You had some influence, to be sure, but your job is done.

Now what?

Which brings me back to my main point: You aren't your parents, and you aren't your kids. You are you. Try to separate yourself from your parents at some point. Be polite to them, even caring. But understand that they were already grown-ups when they had you, and so they brought their own issues -- with themselves and with each other -- to your upbringing. Trust them when it seems to make sense, but also learn to trust yourself. You've been out in the world a while, and you've seen how people treat each other and react to each other. You have some opinions about how life should be lived, right? Right.

And, if you're a parent, you've tried to bring up your child in a way that you think will make him or her a useful, cooperative, kind -- and maybe fun -- person. Unless you've really screwed up by putting your own interests first -- and you know if you have -- you should feel confident and happy to let your child go out into the world. Yes, our children will require more help from us when they venture out on their own -- financial help/emotional help/etc. -- but it's important that we make them feel good about taking that first step . . . and insist that they take it! That they -- gulp -- leave us.

And when they leave us, what are we left with? Ourselves. You. And me. Not our parents, not our children. Just us. Just you. Just me. Are you okay with that?

Good luck!

Men do have one advantage over women -- and it's not what you think.

No, it's not intelligence. Women and men are equally intelligent. Maybe men score better on spatial tests -- hence all the male engineers -- but women trounce men when it comes to any field of study related to emotions and intuition and just being able to get along with other people.
(If women ruled the world, we would all be so much better off!) And it's not muscles, either. Granted, men are, on the whole, stronger than women. So what? We can beat them up, but, thankfully, our modern system of laws makes that a crime. We can run faster -- not me, but the fastest of men -- and lift more weights, but those aren't skills that mean much in the post-school years. In real life, in other words. In my own line of work -- college textbook publishing -- I have seen women hired over men many times, because they were better qualified and better prepared for the job, and I've seen many of them promoted over men for the same reason. No, it's not muscles.

So what is the one big advantage men have over women?

Nothing you've lot of, probably, if you're a woman. If you're a man, you've probably thought of it but also thought: that can't be right, can it? Yes, it can. The one big advantage that men have over women is that we, the men, can pee outside. Almost anywhere.

Think about it. You've been driving for hours, and you have to use the restroom. If you're a woman, you drive and drive until you find a rest stop or a service station or whatever. (And even then, it may be so gross that you can't use it.) If you're a man, you look for the first dark turn-off and you get out and, in a minute or so, you're done and back in the car, feeling no pressure, happy and smiling. Or suppose you're out hiking, and after a few hours you need to go. If you're a woman, you have to find a secluded place and check the ground very carefully for weird insects or whatever, and then, when you're done, you have to wipe yourself with a tissue and find a place to deposit it. The man, on the other hand, whips it out, does his business, zips up, and is gone. No touching anything foreign, no clean-up after.

Fair? Of course not.

But keep in mind, ladies, that, over the course of history, men have been drafted to fight most of the wars and so have died younger and in greater numbers, and that they/we continue to die at earlier ages than you do -- usually because of poor lifestyle choices -- making it possible for you to spend your declining years among other women, your girlfriends, who understand you and appreciate you and love you more completely and sincerely than any man ever did.

How you feel about your life depends on how you feel today.

You wake up feeling like shit. You drank too much last night or you argued with your mate or you have a baffling assignment in a class or on your job, and you've tossed and turned all night. The alarm goes off, and you haven't had enough sleep. You get up, because you're a good worker bee, and you make your way to class or to your job or go about getting your kids off to school, etc. But you feel awful. Tired and sleepy, maybe a headache or vague chest pains. You would like nothing better than to lie down in a dark room and sleep all day. But you know you can't. You might even think that life is not worth living. You haven't turned out to be the person you thought you would be. Your marriage/relationship isn't what you'd hoped for. The day stretches ahead like an endless desert. Should you just end it all? Put yourself out of your misery? Make arrangements for the mate, for friends, for the kids -- write a note, lay out some supper, etc. If you haven't guessed already, this goes back to an earlier posting that said something life this: If you want to commit suicide, wait until tomorrow. It's true: the way you feel today is not the way you will feel tomorrow, and it's not even a true reflection of how you look at life. You may very well be a positive person simply having a bad day. You could wake
up tomorrow, having had a good night's sleep, and feel good about everything all over again.
We are creatures of the mind and of the flesh: we get bummed and bored and depressed and have real problems just getting out of bed, much less putting one foot in front of the other. It's common to all of us, so don't feel alone. Instead, do yourself a favor and lay off the booze for a night, avoid the toxic people in your life for a day, and try not to think about what you have to do tomorrow. Rent a movie you like and sit up in bed eating something you want and then turn the light off at a reasonable time and go to sleep. Chances are your view of the world and your life will be quite different in the morning. I've tried it. I know. Repeat as necessary.