How's it going, then?This sort of conversation happens all the time between bicycles, disappointed to discover that fish don't need them. If you've ever been told `There's plenty more fish in the sea.', it probably wasn't what you wanted to hear. You wanted to hear `You'll get it back together. She loves you really. You're the only woman in her life.', didn't you? You didn't ever think she'd leave you, especially not for a bloke, but she did, and she's gone, and you need to find a way to cope.Oh. Grim.
What's wrong?
Beluga's left me. I feel like hanging myself.
Hey, calm down. Don't let it get to you. There's plenty more fish in the sea.
The truth is that your friend was giving you some very useful advice, so I hope you didn't hit him. Just look at it statistically.
How many people do you know? Let's be generous and say one thousand. Now, how many of them do you fancy? Just a little bit? Well, there's the one who just dumped you anyway. One in a thousand---not terribly good odds at first sight, are they? But how many people are there? Tens of millions, that's how many. Multiply up, and at a very conservative estimate, that's ten thousand people you'd fancy if only you knew them, so there's plenty more fish in the sea---you've just got to keep swimming.
Shall we eavesdrop a little more on our two-wheeled friends?
But, Beluga and I, we had something really special.True love. Ahhh, how sweet. That one perfect someone, out there somewhere, waiting for you. You thought it was her, didn't you? Dear oh dear. Perhaps there is a fish out there, just made for you, but what are the odds on you finding it. How many people will you meet in your life? How many people are there? It's not looking good, is it?Never mind, eh? You'll soon be back in top gear.
Beluga means everything to me, you know.
Look, pull yourself together. There's no point in breaking an axle over a fish.
You just don't understand true love, do you?
Yet there's plenty of folks out there shagging, and some of them are even enjoying it. There are a lot of people who will tell you, if you are so bold as to ask them, that they are `in love', but if we all had to wait for that special somebody, those `in love' would be a very lucky few. Are you so arrogant as to believe that your love is true, when all the love you see around you is illusion?
But there's lots of love around---everywhere you look.Meanwhile, back in the real world, what brings about these `relationships', this pairbonding which seems to happen to so many of us, when true love happens to so few? Pairbonding is the means by which we prop up our fragile egos and satiate our turbulent ids. It is a support mechanism, essential only to those of our fellows unfortunate enough to lack the basic self-respect we need to accept ourselves as worthwhile members of the human community. Am I saying that only those with insufficient self-respect get involved in pairbonding? Of course not. What I am saying is that we must not credit our relationships with undeserved importance.That's just lust. Love doesn't grow on trees, you know. But Beluga and I, we had true love---not just animal frenzy---genuine self-sacrificing compassion. And now that crazy fish has gone and left me all alone.
Well, if it's self-sacrificing you want, you might as well top yourself now.
The extra element which distinguishes pairbonding from more platonic forms of mutual emotional involvement (or `friendship', as it is more commonly known), is sex. Fundamentally, in whatever form is to your taste, physical intimacy is nice. Largely speaking, we are all built to enjoy the mutual stimulation of our erogenous zones, preferably as a means of expressing the pleasure we derive from emotional involvement. While emotional involvement principally requires communication, which is a relatively advanced technology, physical intimacy clearly requires physical presence, a technology not nearly so well developed. This is why we select pairbonding partners primarily on the basis of proximity. Fundamentally, whatever effect appearance, character and even emotional involvement may have, we need our lovers to be near us. It is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that convenience is the main deciding factor, with all the other considerations being relatively minor details.
Given that our pairbondings are essentially pragmatic, it seems natural to ask why we bother with them at all. What advantage is there in selecting a unique partner? Certainly, monogamy reduces the risk of sexually transmitted disease, but then again, this has little relevance to the morality or emotional value of physical intimacy---merely its medical advisability in particular cases.
There is also the highly debatable suggestion that a pairbond provides the optimal environment for the rearing of children. The usual argument behind this relies on the fact that this is a social norm arising from a selective evolutionary process---if there was something better, we'd be doing that instead. However, there is no reason to believe that this evolutionary process has stopped, and much reason to believe that social evolution, like technological evolution, is proceeding much more rapidly now than it has ever done. In any case, there are many pairbonds within which the raising of children is not on the agenda---why then should the morality and pragmatics of such pairbonds be based on a model which simply does not apply?
Let's face it. The reason pairbonding is so popular is that its participants simply cannot handle jealousy. The purpose of pairbonding is not to permit physical intimacy between the two people involved but rather to forbid them physical intimacy with others. Quite why it is considered right to indulge negative emotions such as jealousy while suppressing positive emotions such as love is entirely lost on me. Further, in the all too common situation where your emotional exchange with your close friends runs more deeply than that with your partner, pairbonding is, to be brutally frank, stupid.
So, finally, a thought for all of you folks jealously clinging on to your partners and suppressing your feelings towards the people you love...
There's plenty more fish in the sea.