Stories of a Wanderer: True Love

Our own Sid Lukkassen is currently traveling through South America and writes about his experiences. The first story of Sid’s traveling log can be found here.

At the height of some Latin festival, I ended up in a flat in sun-drenched Asunción. There, I enjoyed a cool glass of water in conversation with host Jim Cambios, CEO of local foreign exchange company ‘J&M Cambios’. A lesbian couple also chimed in – interest was high as the topic was nothing less than ‘True Love’.

The local expat community, united in the ‘Men's Health Group’, urged us to record this conversation. Unfortunately, the technology present was not adequate for this purpose. However, nothing prevents me from making the content of the conversation public afterwards – here it is. It really was a conversation where you want to buckle your seatbelt beforehand.

Transactional model
Love is fundamentally a transaction, Jim argued, referring to a YouTube video by a psychologist. Before I will respond to it, I want to clarify the foundations of his argument.

If you exchange a dollar and you get exactly one dollar in return, why make that exchange at all? Then you are pumping attention and energy into a transaction that will not take you forward. An exchange is something you enter into because you think it will benefit you. So this is where the slogan comes from, ‘there is no such thing as fair trade’.

If we extend this to the relational sphere, one ends up in the situation where women are attracted to men who accumulate a lot of resources. Older men have had much more time to accumulate resources and build up skills, making them more attractive than younger men.

Men, on the other hand, usually pick a woman on beauty, and in this respect younger women tend to be more attractive than older ones. So by definition you get age inequality in relationships, and it is typical that only the West is hypocritical and moralistically aggravated about this. Thus Jim’s argument.

Coffee bar analogy
It should be added that a woman can go down the path of career, of business success and earning money – thus competing within a hierarchy where masculine traits are paramount. But then comes the time to find a partner; now she knocks on the door of the men she finds attractive. These are men who probably already have financial security and status, and are mainly looking for feminine beauty. Now it is like she arrives with a jug of coffee in a coffee bar: “Nice, that coffee.” the bar owner says. “But I already have that. Don’t bring me coffee, bring me money.”

The moment had come for Doctor Sid to respond. The lesbian couple listened with bated breath – what politically-incorrect talk would follow next?

Since yes, what is there really to argue against such solid reasoning? Yet my intuition told me that something was wrong, that I had to contradict Jim Cambios. My intuition led me to kickboxing, which I started talking about, without actually knowing why. But I trusted my intuition – things were going to work out.

Kickboxing
To be a decent kickboxer, you need a number of virtues. These are courage, discipline and perseverance. Because after all, you are going to take hits and must not give up, otherwise you will never learn. After several years of intensive training, the sport becomes part of your system. The rhythm of movement becomes part of your nervous system, your cognition: it becomes a ‘glue’ between body and mind; a glue that makes everything more solid and fierce. You know you are capable of manifesting explosive and overwhelming power.

Such a skill then becomes so deeply internalised that it becomes part of your self-confidence. You know that whatever dregs life throws at you, that you are no wimp, that you can deal blows and take them, that you are tried and tested, that you have shown balls. Even if you step into a crowded train where there is an aggressive atmosphere, you are not easily shaken, because the strength is deep within yourself.

And so from this strength, from this deeply tested self-esteem, you also defy all the games, all the push-pull bullshit and time-wasting ‘guessing games’ that women unleash on the dating scene and relationship market. To reach your level of self-confidence, agility and explosive power, you have had to invest hundreds, thousands of hours of persistence. What does the woman invest in the quality she arrives with? Her beauty? Usually her investments are limited and the beauty is most often a quality imparted by nature. It is mostly her youthfulness, and maybe she spends a few hours a month at the nail salon and hairdresser.

From that situation, you can no longer take seriously the woman who is playing ‘hard to get’ with you. She ]probably has had to make hardly any sacrifices to be found attractive by men and still she thinks she can play games with you.

One could argue that this is a ‘category mistake’ – that prowess in a combat sport cannot be transmuted to the social field of the dating market. But once one has traversed so far on that arduous path of inner discipline, one loses all tolerance for those who waste your time with manipulative social games. 

The problem of easy money
Jim Cambios is right in saying that men in their fifties and sixties can certainly still come home with hot dates. And it gets worse – as a fascinating side effect – because those young women often get some money thrown at them by their older partners. And that extra money raises their standard of living; they get used to it. Once they attempt to date men in their own age group, they get stressed out in relation to their spending habits. This is why they keep dating older men ‘on the side’. With older men for whom those extra funds they hand over to their younger mistresses is usually little money.

This is similar to the emancipation of black groups in the US. Halfway in the last century, things were in relatively good shape: most blacks lived in traditionally constituted families and had internalised the values of bourgeois capitalism. But then leftist ideas became popular and the welfare state came along with free money. This changed the work ethic as well as spending patterns, and things went awry again. The same applies to young women dating older men.

True love is increasingly difficult to obtain
The point of kickboxing and that free money, therefore, is that you are not on an equal platform with that woman you attract or take on as your partner. The older, richer man goes with her because she is young, slim, pretty and a bit sweet, but actually her internal qualities – qualities that really take effort to make your own within life – are often not that well developed. This makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to feel true love. This transactional analysis, insofar as it is true, is at the same time an attenuation of the human capacity for authentic attachment.

Let’s compare this to walking up a flight of stairs together. When I was 25, I met my then partner of 23. We were in the same age bracket and were both hard workers. I was, and still am, in awe of her. She is an ambitious go-getter and managed to establish something. I will carry that in my heart with warmth. It is a completely different story from having money, power, fame and status at a certain point, and then having women come knocking on your door who, while being sexually and aesthetically very attractive, have actually seen little of life and cannot relate to your struggles.

The analogy of walking up the stairs becomes visible in chess: the king can only move one square at a time whereas the queen sweeps across the entire board. Through their beauty and allure, women have certain ‘social hacks’ in life that allow them to skip large volumes of stairs. Whereas the man must toil away one step at a time to elevate himself, but in that process also loses respect for the damsel who just hovers past him on the basis of social grace and beauty. 

For a woman you climbed the stairs with, you have much more awe, recognition and reverence than for a ‘groupie’. Any man who is honest with himself will have to admit this in the depths of his heart. Here we are not talking about sexual arousal, but about true love.

Cynicism
Jim Cambios responded by cynically arguing: “Yes but Sid, I’m 64 now. And a woman who is 64 like me is of no sexual interest to me. Although, of course, I could cherish and value her as a soulmate and life partner. But that is something else. I am a man and live a healthy life: my instincts are still very vital, I embrace life! What more can I say?’

Two more comments I will devote to it – bringing this to a close.

That first comment is the infamous lesson from the film Doctor Zhivago, which shows us the essence. Before the Russian Revolution, the beautiful Lara Antipova sleeps with a droll liberal parliamentarian. After the revolution, she is suddenly lying next to a tightly-uniformed communist army officer.

‘Alpha males’
All those substantive, exhaustive battles around policy and ideology – which also involve a lot of risk – are uninteresting to most women. For them, it is much more important to be able to ‘navigate up socially’ to the new ‘alpha males’ once the revolution has arrived. Aesthetic beauty and social fluency are the most useful qualities for them in this regard.

So we come back to the story: a woman may be beautiful, young, comely and slim, but was she really by your side when you were undergoing your toughest trials in life? Or did she come along when the weather was already nice? This determines the depth of the love you can feel for your partner. Or whether the relationship is indeed mostly a cynical transaction after all.

Hope
Nevertheless, I want to conclude with a beautiful and hopeful piece of interpretation: there is something in true love that you want to discover and develop both in yourself and in the other person. And that simultaneously gives you the will to go through tough ordeals together.

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