Love changes as you get older and in some ways I think it comes full circle.
The first real love we have is mom and it's all about being naked, cuddling and feeling safe and secure. And oh those boobs.
Strangely enough after all these years, that is exactly what I want....and a whole lot more.
Let us track love.
Love is pure as Ivory soap until thehormones kick in much the same way that Britney Spears beat the crap out of a car with an umbrella once upon a rage ago and for the next five decades or so love and sex become the equivalent of the final days of Trump vs. Clinton. It's stupid vs rational in a winner take all fight.
But as you get a wee bit older and hopefully more mature, the Trump part of you starts to settle down and stops asking insistently during sex, "Are we there yet?"
Ever since online dating took hold it has felt to me like we had all become basically catalogue shoppers for Russian brides.
Part of the reason that I think that the real Trump has emerged victorious amongst the Confederacy of Donces is because his behavior is a lot like our own when we are on the internet---especially when we are madly sweeping left or right on pictures until we are all a nation stricken with chronic tindernitus.
We're all, young and old alike, often completely full of shit on those dating sites especially. We say what we want, lie about our age and God knows what else while we puff our chests up for a our mutual Rainforest/Trump-like mating ritual.
In my personal experience, the pictures that women post online are a fascinating and slow descent into actual truth.
The right-out-the-gate, first picture is always the casting call shot. The airbrushed, glossy 8X10 version of what these women wish that they could really look like if light and shadows always cooperated like that.
The second shot is the one that brings to focus what they really look like and it is often jaw droppingly shocking. How do you go from Kate Upton to Ruth Buzzi in just two moves? Even Spencer Tracy couldn't pull off a metamorphosis that fast in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
The third shot is the one that sends you running. It is the desperation shot that shows the unfortunate wacky side which often features a regrettable sombrero, a spontaneous, wildly inappropriate Jules Feiffer quality dance to spring (which is often performed with a headstand in a bathing suit on the beach), a look-how loving-I can-be shot with bewildered pets or squeezed way too hard kids and finally, other men or even the occasional bewildered celebrity who they might have muscled into taking a picture with them.
Most of this is torture to me because all I see is a kind of quiet desperation. Now I cannot tell you what men do on these sites because I've never shopped for one. But I am willing to bet that it's pretty much the same deal. I'm imagining sucked in guts hair twirled as artfully as the top of a cinnamon bun or perhaps an enhanced with a cucumber, Spinal Tap/Derek Smalls package. The subliminal message has to be: I'm one potent, dick swinging monkey. Let me teenage you.
Lies. Distortion. Make believe.
That's what gets us through our days and nights and it has affected everything. And the more Trump trumps this kind of behavior I fear the less authentic and real we will continue to be which is why so many at it's rallies are throwing tantrums or playground bullying Hillary---who must come across to them as the scary lady teacher who they all secretly fear.
Most of his followers, like the GOP themselves, are deeply rooted in the long ago obliterated past where white men took whatever they wanted from people of color like the shoplifting punks that we have always been.
Me take. Me want more.
That should be printed on every single dollar bill.
Which brings me back to love.
There are just so many times that you can put love through the washing and drying cycles of your life before it starts to fray, fade and fall apart.
I think we need to learn to accept what love means to us at any stage of our lives and listen to what it is telling us.
Since I'm closer to my own personal expiration date than I am, say, high school, I find that love is telling me to slow the hell down. To listen more and compete less. It's telling me that my real value comes not from my boyish good looks and cheeky charm, but rather from the depth of my wisdom, which is the bank account interest of my compounded soul.
Sure, the thought of circumnavigating my hand down the small of a woman's back is still a big ticket draw as are the meaningful, declarative kiss and the taffy melting feeling you get when you share a mutual smile.
But I want that and more now.
I crave to admire a woman's unbridled success. To learn from her like a perpetual Yentil. To be moved by both her tears and her choice in music....which better be made mostly of The Beatles because I plan to die with the song "In My Life" playing through the room full of vases of forget-me-nots.
I want to be read to by her and not audible.com. Hopefully it's something that she just wrote and cannot wait to share.
I want the exact same kind of maturity and life experience that can only comes after a million miles on the road.
And that, my friends, is the only kind of journey worth having.
Sent from my iPad