Atheism and Love

I was chatting to a friend yesterday about a topic that related to my previous post about Atheism and Marriage. That is, how much effort one should put into a relationship and is it possible to actually have a relationship involving more than two people?

I said in that post, "The only real problem is that we often lack the social skills to have one good friendship in our lives... much less three." This statement probably sounds shocking to many people, but honestly, how many people do feel helpless in doing away with the endless cycle of problems they seem to have in many of their friendships?

I would like to put forward my viewpoint that we're approaching relationships in the completely wrong way. We're looking at a friendship as an end goal: security, love, kindness and compassion whenever we need it. Truly, friendship is the greatest gift a human being is capable of giving, and often it is taken for granted or dismissed casually in statements like "we're only friends." While friendships are all of these things... we're expecting them to just 'happen' naturally and spontaneously. Once an international student asked me: "are we friending?" They used the wrong verb, but in so doing they produced a whole new concept: friendship as a process.

I believe that friendship is a process and all processes require one to put energy into it. No two people are exactly alike... most often they aren't even close to it. So you'll probably never meet a person with whom you agree with them on everything. So, you're going to have conflicts and disagreements with that person, it is inevitable. So how to do you deal with them? Generally, because laziness is a good survival strategy for any organism, we use the least personally demanding option. We can: ignore it, deny it, ridicule it, guilt/shame them into changing their mind or keep it to themselves and so on. But to accept, investigate, discover, understand and appreciate the difference requires more effort.

I think that it is always worth the effort to seek to understand these differences in our friends. Like my ealier story with Pandora implies; curing a disease is more meaningful than simply exterminating everyone with the disease. For example: if we just killed every person with haemophilia or who carry the disease in their genetics we could eliminate this disease forever. However, if we cure haemophilia in the process we become far far wiser about how blood clots, how blood works, how blood is created, how our genetics work, how our genetics can be repaired etc... while one group can say "we solved the problem," the group that cured it can say, "we cured it, understood the problem, learned a lot more about ourselves and even improved ourselves both in wisdom and compassion (and maybe genetically as well?) through curing it,"

I get annoyed when people associate 'love' exclusively with romantic relationships. I honestly believe love was originally intended to describe friendships not romantic relationships. But somewhere along the line we've stopped thinking clearly about the fact that at the root of romance is sex, lust and reproduction - not love.

Rather 'to love' is an extreme form of the verb 'to like' and is rather disrespected in English to this end nowadays. But how can we love someone who is so different from us? Two ways, the first is that we're ignorant of how different we are to that person - this is an unstable form of love - secondly, we have put the effort into getting to know that person inside-out and we don't feel threatened by the differences we have. I guess I've just invented the terms 'weak love' and 'strong love' much like 'weak atheism' and 'strong atheism' (weak = ignorant, strong = informed).

The conclusion, if we want to love someone in the strong sense we need to put energy, time and effort into the relationship. We need to create an environment where the other person feels comfortable being open, honest and safe telling you their problems, vices and limitations - while at the same time the other person allows you to feel the same by putting in a recipricol effort. How can creatures such as ourselves full of prejudices, insecurities and ignorance do this? By changing, by listening, by growing in self-knowledge and knowledge about other people and where they're coming from.

I believe that if more people put the time and effort needed to bridge cultural, sexual, emotional differences that in the future the spontaneous formation of quaples and other complex social structures built upon the basic framework of friendship can become possible, easier and desireable. The thing is, almost everyone is capable of friendship and love... all that is required is a different perspective:

Why are the people who need love the most also the hardest to love?
Because love requires sacrifice and the harder you have to push yourself to love another person, the more you'll learn, grow and develop as an individual.

What about freeloaders and cheats?
If the other person won't put the effort you are putting into the relationship then it isn't going to work. There is nothing wrong in giving up on a person who doesn't try at all. While yes, you could still learn a lot from the endeavour, however, the one giving that much effort shouldn't expect or depend on it succeeding less they be compromised and exploited.

Again, there's nothing about sex in here because I don't see what it has to do with love. Friendship extends across all borders, including species (cats, dogs, pigs, horses etc...) and probably in the future it will include artificial intelligences as well. While saying that, loving the person with whom you have sexual intercourse with is a great thing... but I would hope that you're friends with the person you're having sex with first and that friendship is the root of the love. (Although if you're not friends with the person you're having sexual relations with and you're both ok with that I have no problems with that either - it just isn't my cup of tea).