The Broken Coin

Love between man and woman casts out loneliness.  That is perhaps the beginning and the end of it. I am thinking in terms of Plato's image of the broken coin.  When the other half is missing, love is not there.

In our day and time, of course, it is quite easy to have a marriage based on strong sexual attraction and still be terribly lonely.  Most of our marriages, after the first flush of sex, are like that, if we are to believe most of the polls on the subject.  The divorce figures demonstrate amply that the institution of marriage today imperfectly fulfills our emotional needs and specifically our need for that love which casts out loneliness.

The sexual attraction has, for most of us, little or nothing to do with love at any age.  If it could be thought of as something apart from love or just usefully coexisting with it, there would be a lot less misery about.  The sexual attraction exists for one purpose.  That is not the pleasure it gives us.  It exists for peopling the world with our like.  This is thought to be an ignoble motive in some quarters, where some people with quite a lot of money are being crowded by other people with much less money, and other differences like color and religion.  These people try to trade the joy of procreation for the pleasure of sex.  Most of us find that a rotten bargain, in spite of those fake-joyous zero population growth bumper stickers saying "None is fun."

In its strong form, the sexual attraction exists for about half our life.  This is the time of our youth and maturity, when nature requires studs and mares.  We forget this in our peril.

But before this period of productive usefulness, and during it and after it, there is a positive need to share your life, both outer and inner.  The inability or lack of opportunity to do this sharing is loneliness.  Though some sturdy souls can abide it, loneliness is a most unnatural condition.  In its prolonged and most acute form, it is called desperation.  "I maintain, my brothers, that hell is the inability to love."  Thus spoke Dostoievsky, who knew a lot about the hell of loneliness.  This is the particular hell of not being able to share, not wishing to enter the sanctuary of someone else.

Even the man who is hopelessly in love with an unattainable object is less than lonely because he can people his life with dreams of possession.  Dreams unfulfilled have more to recommend them than the achieved reality as more than one wise man has told us.  The green light at the end of the dock was more important to Jay Gatsby than life itself.  He was a fool in luck.

The sad part about loneliness is not that it is unnatural, but that it has been forced on the lonely by some experience or experiences too terrible almost to be borne and certainly too terrible to look forward to again.  The people who most need love, by one of nature's ironies, are nearly always the persons most often hurt by it.

To be forced into loneliness by neglect or cruelty or consuming love (or, as sometimes happens, all three together) is to suffer the fate of the walking damned.  You are crippled in the worst way.  You are unable to reach out.  If the hurt has been great enough, you cannot even let your hurt be known.  If it has been greater, you turn the face of hate on the world.  The coin will stay broken.

About sex and love, you might like something I heard the other night.  "Think of all the lovers who are no longer friends.  Think of all the lovers who are still friends.  Think of all the friends who were never lovers."