Even when I don't envy celebrities, I compare myself to them. Like I enmesh my identity with this idealized notion of what they are, that I'm not. I let them get to me: I hate how they're so skinny that girls think they’re getting "fat" when they hit highschool and grow out of a size 2. I’m annoyed that their casual sex lives look so glossy and easy, and their divorces hardly seem to inconvenience them.
And we're codependent. Because I pay, month after month, to read, watch and ogle their beautiful, awful lives. I’m the enabler, because I consume it all. The glamorous photo shoots and the paparazzi shots. That section of Us Weekly that says "Stars: They’re just like Us!" – and all the advertising along the way, so I know what purchases will cure my imperfections and make me more like them. I haven’t actually bought any pore-minimizer, but I look in the mirror see lots of pores. More pores on my nose alone than I can see on the combined surface area of Angelina Jolie’s entire family. I also see heavier arms, shaggier brows -- and a happy wife who met her husband when he was single; and a grown daughter who is happily on speaking terms with her wonderful dad. But, as long as I compare myself, I can only see Robin, The Not-Angelina. Whether I "buy into" it or not, I’m buying it.
Thomas Merton (who pre-dated pore minimizer, but would know what I’m talking about) described this as the loss of love itself. In his Love and need: Is love a package or a message? He wrote about "the advertising imagery which associates sexual fulfillment with all the most trivial forms of satisfaction" -- what's now the conventional wisdom that "sex sells." Merton saw this rooted in our very definition of love as a "a package concept." Pursuing love as a "thing" – the promise of ultimate fulfillment of a need – pushes us to seek others who will "make a deal" to love us. As Merton says, "in order to make a deal you have to appear in the market with a worthwhile product, or if the product is worthless you can get by if you dress it up in a good-looking package. We unconsciously think of ourselves as objects for sale on the market. We want to be wanted. We want to attract customers. We want to look like the kind of product that makes money." At some level, even the most educated and emotionally healthy of us are bound to wonder whether, if we were more attractive, we would be happier. But to ask this question, we are hoping for conditional love, and nothing more.
Celebrities are everywhere – our constant reminder of an ideal package we covet but cannot compete with. This is the fascination with Jennifer Aniston: She is so beautifully packaged, how could someone leave her? Her wedding vows promised her "banana milkshakes forever" -- really a pretty lame aspiration, and her husband couldn’t even live up to that. Maybe she’s not as worthy as she looks. Maybe my own package isn’t so bad. At least I’m not starving myself and constantly photographed by strangers. But comparisons debase us all (and are haunting -- what if a woman of Angelina Jolie-caliber attractiveness becomes interested in my husband?) But my marriage is not an achievement, any more than my body is an accessory.
When we stop measuring ourselves by perfection (or cattily refusing it), what waits for us is unconditional love. It's the same liberation we find when we stop trying to control our children with affection and anger. Anything less, Merton says, misses the whole point of life itself: "Love is not an emptiness to be filled. It is a sacrifice. It is a form of worship. A positive force. A transcendent spiritual power. The deepest creative power in human nature. A living appreciation of life as value and as gift. The revelation of our deepest personal meaning. " And he does not dismiss the fulfilling power of relationships. Unconditional love is not a reward for perfection. It is the revelation of ourselves through the sacrifice of another.
My true meaning and worth are shown to me not in my estimate of myself, but in the eyes of the one who loves me; and that one must love me as I am, with my faults and limitations, revealing to me the truth that these faults and limitations cannot destroy my worth in their yes; and that I am therefore valuable as a person, In spite of my shortcomings, in spite of the imperfections of my exterior "package." The package is totally unimportant. What matters is this infinties precious message which I can discover only in my love for another person.I’m working on it. Maybe Angelina is too. We’ll see how she’s doing after she and Brad spend four long years together.
"Love is not just something that happens to you: Love is a certain special way of being alive."
Thomas Merton
5 comments:
Wow. Nicely stated. Jeez, you should publish, Robin. I'm touched and befuddled. I think of Fr. Michael saying: "You are not loved for who you are, but THAT you are." Same thing. Or what Kevin SJ. once said, in 1977, that "heaven is like falling in love." (Note it's not the other way around!) I'm always a little floored by such fine articulations of love. Would that the lived thing was as worthy as the stated!!!!
Maybe it's easier than it sounds --unconditional love is available to us (and all around us in simple ways) -- small acts of charity and friendship? And even our more imperfect relationships can have their moments of sacrifice and truth -- little messages of love that we give each other.
Well, I used to think there were only two reliable sources for unconditional love. God and small dogs. Now that I have Duncan, who not only came with a volume set of conditions that would choke a horse, he had every page noterized in triplicate. That leaves you know Who.
The Who? I unconditionally love Pete Townsend, but I'm not sure it's reciprocal.
I agree that only God can love us perfectly. All I'm talking about is the simple acts of charity twoard each other that are all around us. "Unconditional" doesn't mean perfect and it doesn't mean constant happiness -- it just means we accept ourselves and others as we are, and love independently of trying to reward, control or change us/others.
You people do it all the time. For instance, turning off your awful album of The Who, out of consideration to me and without expecting anything in return, is a simple gesture of unconditional love.
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