E
eLove? Naaahh…
If you want to be a happy single person, try to keep in mind that there are another six billion people on the earth to consider besides you. Almost everyone is trying to understand and experience love and happiness. I want to know more about it too.
All these humans are driven by primal needs for safety (by forming groups), shelter, food, and creating a feeling of family (which leads to sex). Your science teacher may have told you that our instincts for these needs arrived with us at birth. Early humans had them too. The skills you need to satisfy these simple instincts of self-preservation are all learned skills. Formal training in the various life skills, like language and social custom begin early in all cultures. Children also use games to learn social skills. These games help them interact with peers as they grow up.
Unfortunately, the games never really stopped. They just moved into a more complex playground. As you began to make your own decisions as a teen, this was about the time you probably assumed that you knew everything about interacting with others.
Holy cats! So wrong. We are so wrong.
There is so much more to understand about how to connect to others, especially when dating, than you learned in your teens and early twenties. Let me explain through a simple analogy.
Just how good of a cook are you?
Creating fulfilling romantic relationships and friendships in the modern world is sort of a skill, a craft, like cooking. Cooking usually takes a fire of some sort. It would seem that there is not much skill in cranking on the burner, but the complexity underlying the instant cooking flame in your kitchen is enormous. To cook, you don't need to learn how to start a fire with sticks. You simply turn a switch to the "ON" position.
The point of letter E is this: it may look like relationship skills improve through emails and SMS, the popular short message service, (cell phone text messages), these do soothe the grouping instinct, but a moment between people that brings forth a warm smile, a hug or watery eyes will always mean more than billions of blinking screens of ;) , :( , LOL, etc.
Make sure technology does not rob you of your instincts to get watery eyes or give a warm smile to a friend or show someone you care for them by wrapping your arms around them. Squeeze gently, please!
Some humans are surrounded by modern things like blenders, digital clocks, DVD players, cell phones and microwaves, but the truth is many humans, more than you would guess, do not have electricity. Ironically, likely may fair a little better than you in the mystical matters of love, my friend.
At this point of intersection, where technology and human relationships crash into each other, I hope there might someday be a little set of SMS text symbols for the phrase:
'I am listening to you and I care about what you are saying to me right now.'
Maybe it will look like this:
(q2unXOXOur<..
(q for 'I am listening.' It resembles and ear.
2u for 'to you'
n for and
XOXO for ' I care about you.'
Ur for 'you are'
and finally….
<.. for 'saying to me' or 'talking'.
A warm smile will convey it much better and a good hug will make it mean something. These kinds of non-verbal methods of communication are difficult to translate over electronic devices.
The Singleship skills are the rocks, sticks and dry grass that sparked the great cooking fires of romance for our ancestors. Learn the value of building a fire of romance and friendship and then, get cooking my friend.
Go back and read the first two skills of Singleship. How do you think they will help your romances?
Your friendships?
If you are in constant contact with friends and loved ones, how will you ever know how important they are to you if you never miss them?
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