“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead"
Bertrand Russell
This quote was sent to me in an email along with expert advice on how to go about finding love. One thing people have a hard time with is understanding that I have no desire for love. Why is that so hard to grasp?
First off I did not know who Bertrand Russell was so I looked him up. He was quite an interesting character. He was born in 1872 and died in 1970. Here is what wikipedia had to say in their opening paragraph about him
“…was a British philosopher, historian, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, and pacifist. Although usually regarded as English, as he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born and raised in Wales.”
He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 in literature. He married a Quaker woman Alys Pearsall Smith in 1894, in 1901 while on a bike ride he realized he no longer loved her and spent the next several years traveling around and having affairs with various and numerous women. In 1921 after returning to England with his pregnant lover, Dora Black, he arranged a hasty divorce and married Dora 6 days later. Russell and Dora divorced in 1932, he then married his third wife Patricia Spence; his children’s nanny; in 1936. He divorced her in 1952 and married his fourth wife Edith Finch in December of that year and stayed with Edith until his death in 1970.
It was surprising to learn that he was an advocate of “easy divorce.” Really, who would think after divorcing 3 women that he would support easy divorce. However, he only supported easy divorce if there were no children. Does that mean he wanted his divorce from Dora; whom he had two children and Patricia; whom he had one son, to be difficult? He felt that if you had children you should stay married for the children and have affairs with anyone you wanted and you should be tolerant of those affairs. I have to wonder if he was okay with the wife having the affairs or if only he was allowed to have the affairs and she was suppose to be okay with it. My conclusion is that since they divorced the wives were not tolerant to his affairs.
He did support the women’s suffrage movement so there is one redeeming quality. He wrote a paper called “Marriage and Morals” which went against the Victorian ideals of marriage and sex. He basically thought anyone should be able to have sex married or not, as long as they were in love. This only worked as long as the women where whores. That was the only acceptable way during the Victorian era. Am I for that? Not really. But, to be honest “respectable” men did not want to marry a non-virgin, they were considered loose and not appropriate for marriage into society. So it was a catch 22 for the Victorian men, screw who you want - just don’t marry them.
In defense of Mr. Bertrand he did have several redeeming qualities I just don’t feel that love was one of them. So why am I going on about this man’s quote? Because, it goes back to everyone must have love or they are not fit to be a human in our universe.
I am not afraid of love. I don’t believe in love between two adults. You can not be afraid of something you do not believe in and have never experienced. Why would I believe in something that I have 100% accuracy in proving does not exist? Not once in my life have I been successful in love with a spouse or boyfriend, so therefore by my own experimentation it does not exist. It is not like I found it and lost it, I have never found it. It is like looking for a treasure that there is no real proof ever existed. People have all talked about and some claim to have seen it but there is no definite, written, provable, verifiable proof that love exists. I believe lust, friendship, fondness, and compassion can happen between two people but not love.
I love my dogs more than anything in life. I could never imagine waking up one day and say “I am tired of them barking and they need to go. I can not be happy as long as these two dogs are in my life.” If I could do that I would be no better than the animal abusers out there. But, I never once would think of doing this and I get choked up just writing about it. If I feel this way about my dogs and they are only pets. How can you say you love someone one day and the next you decided that you life would be so much better without this person in it? You explain it away by saying life changed, things changed, you changed, you grew apart. My response to that is “If you are in love with this person, these things would not matter. They would never even come up. Because; from what people tell me, love conquers all.” So that in itself proves I have never had love. #1 wanted to live life, #2 wanted to live life with someone else, #3 wanted to live life without me. All three professed to love me and all three woke up one day and decided I no longer fit into their lives or their image of what they wanted in life.
I would like to think that one day a man will come along and sweep me off my feet and I will fall madly in love with him and live happily ever after. But, I know myself well enough to know that anyone who professes to love me better be willing to back it up because the words I Love You mean nothing to me they are only words and words can always be taken back when you change your mind.