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by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 AFRICA Staff Writer

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Mputhumi
Ntabeni

Queenstown, SOUTH AFRICA - I made the error of suggesting to my friend that I feel I'm standing at the crossroads of my life. I was referring to the fact that I'm tired of being single yet I view married life to be an ill-con[ceived] romantic ideal with too many flaws. He said I was always hamstrung by irreconcilable conflicts and went on to quote from an article I once wrote for the Mail and Guardian [South Africa, 7 August, 2003- Ed.], "Inside the mind of a single guy." He then suggested I try my "post-everything weary selfí on the wonders of what he called free love. This is the article:

I associate my failure to get married with my sense of being an outcast in societies I'm naturally attracted to. When we were young my friends predicted I'd be the first down the aisle. They're now all married except myself.

I'm more in my element in a lively multi-ethnic and multicultural community. I love cosmopolitan living (without necessar[ill]y subscribing to the frenetic culture of drugs and sexual ambivalence and the rest of the mores that pass for enlightenment in our age). Yet I feel most differential a round it.

My natural impulse to please, to provoke confidence, to make up for things I've done wrong, and my sense of gratitude should endear me to the fairer sex according to the book. I've also been told there's a serious sweetness and honest willingness about me that inspires confidence among ladies. But all that has amounted to little more than a series of monogamous relationships so far.

I love in others their liberty. The sense of independence is the first thing I'm attracted to. Yet in my lover it is this liberty I wish to subjugate. I want to shatter and dissolve to my own likeness the form of what has attracted me. Yet I do not want it to be anything but itself.

Like an adolescent, I can't master the contradictory tendencies within me: the desire to give, while conquering the need to possess without dominating, and to submit to what I haven't surrendered to.

If, as they say, to allow self to be loved is to renounce self, I find no ability in myself to achieve it. I lack the means for perfect reciprocity to commit the supreme act of liberty, the voluntary self-enslavement (another name for love).

I lack that heroism. I find love an unbearable assault on my liberty when it demands such a sacrifice. Vague offerings of equivocal responses are what I usually manage. I call them love in my moments of ecstasy. At best they're a generosity of the heart that seeks to please in adequate response to the needs of the other.

Obviously this is not authentic love since it's not linked to the whole personality. Perhaps I should congratulate myself instead for being sensible enough to realise I can never sustain that sort of thing until death us do part.

I've been unlucky enough to be loved by people who loved me when I was not myself. The fault was not theirs. They spontaneously loved with sincere, unpretentious devotion what I displayed. Still they've never managed to dispel the pathetic restlessness of a perpetual exile within me when it comes to affairs of the heart.

I've been told, ad nauseam by my married friends, that man does not escape that kind of instinct except by the fertility of marriage, the base of society. As a result my attitude towards marriage is that of an agnostic. I see it as something fundamental to a stable life yet I can't shake my need to subvert it.

Perhaps I'm too submerged in the mood of our times of valuing things by the resonance of solitude and the quality of despair.

The failure to impose order in my life disillusions me of traditional values. It makes me a contradiction to myself as I'm a dynamic traditionalist by sentiment. Still, I'm more disgusted by the informed nonsense of those who choose to philosophise their lapses. By those who are bold with their weaknesses and choose to fashion morals after their own desires and call it progress.

I've lived long enough to respect people's differences, that is, to learn not to measure others by my not so excellent standards. Still such things rankle with me and the fact that our age is unable to create a spiritual fund for itself that can surpass our love for material things and for hedonism.

The dreaming depths, called love, where the powers of mystery still manage to overwhelm us, is the last standpoint outside our egos. Truth is still able to invade our post-everything lives there despite all the spiritual erosion they've gone through. It's providentially merciful that emotional suffering has an ability to shock us out of the staleness and flatness of our lives to higher consciousness.

I've looked at love from all sides now. I'm more certain than before that our hope lies with it. It is the only thing we have no ability to avoid indefinitely in our lives. In time, perhaps, we shall even lose the cant and outgrow the rarefied religious and romantic notions surrounding love to discovering that love is patient kindness in its essence.

I've never been the one at ease with shouted certainties. I stammer about love not because I'm in doubt, but because I'm too convinced. I've understood love to be an encounter with that which cannot be mastered.

"Free love is the most sincere love there is," said my friend, "In free love," he continued, "you're saying I'll love and stay with you so long as you please me. But the minute that love ceases I shall be sincere enough as not to hang around for the sake of appearances."

I've nothing against paying in kind and responding in sincerity for genuine needs, but the problem with free love is that it is not free. Free love has all the flaws of a bad marriage with an added burden of being a revolution against convention.

Free love wants us to treat our desires as promptings of sincerity. This would be admirable if it were true, but we know from experience that it is just a cunning art of lying spontaneously to oneself in an attitude of hedonism. It is Rousseau-like in its utter candour that uses sincerity as an object of selfishness.

"Since Darwin we've understood our lives as being rooted in the level of existence that perdures through change. Change is our only strength for effective renewal." My friend is of that opinion.

When I pointed out that [it is] only to what you stay loyal to, not what you ditch, is renewal possible, he thought me too guarded and passé.

My guard is against mere romantic imaginings that gain undeserved credence through our carelessness. There's a worm in the fruit of free love. Free love is the violence of instinct untamed by convention; a battlefield of egos that favours the avaricious. Very few people care about their freedom to love another when their hearts are bleeding from the betrayals of free a love. Romantic love is exclusive, period.

Our age has gained much in understanding deep psychological contacts between sensibility and the mind. We can explain, for instance, the duality and conflict whenever man is called upon to choose between desire and duty. Free love tells us we should always go with desire. Sound psychology does not agree with that. It says if we want to grow in personal wholeness we must grow the capacity for self-giving by being truthful to our choices. The principal area of growth is in the deepening capacity for selfless interpersonal life and faithfulness.

My friend feels there's something hypocritical in having to stick with a choice (made under any circumstances) just because you happen to have made it earlier. "Humans are allowed room for error in almost everything else, why not love?" he said.

Be that as it may, there's also something disloyal, even disgusting, in a wavering personality. It is subtle dishonesty of spinelessness that's not willing to service choices. The intention of permanence must at least be there, even if weakness overwhelms in the long run, if our choices are to reflect the dignity of our humanity.

Until we obtain perfect inner unity, we're condemned to a certain degree of hypocrisy in all our dealings. We've to silence it to obscurity if we want to grow in love and abide by what we know in our heart of hearts is the right thing to do despite the testimony of our feelings. I may feel like strangling my partner at one moment or the other but sound mentality tells me I grow by choosing to commit to her, especially in those moments when she's not very lovely in my eyes.

At heart, we're alone -- despite all the stifling conformity and proliferation of sensuality of our modern lives. Indeed the thorns of our imperfect nature are better picked in the loneliness of our hearts. But it is that gnawing loneliness that pushes us towards personal fullness or emptiness and will be our constant anxiety until we accept the price of love.

The only love that makes sense is that which self-sacrifices its selfishness in the silence of self-surrendering will. Blind love is the only love that sees clearly what must be endured for the grandeur of love. It represents victory over the temptation of [the] baser self and the perpet ual novelty of [some] insatiable variety of adolescent fascination.

What is hypocritical to me is the fraudulent modern desire to win both sides while playing only one hand. The wish to enjoy the pleasures of order and the advantages of virtue while living the anarchy and drunkenness of feelings. This cheating desire of unwillingness to accept the consequences of one's actions makes our urge to buy into the morbid hyperaesthesia and crass insistence of personal happiness at [the] cost of overriding [the] common good.

Institutions of common good, like marriage, were meant to safeguard us against the hostility of our thousand instinctual self-interests.

We disregard them for the restless anxiety that is at the centre of our non-committal love affairs. We suffer the void as the price for our freedom. Personal happiness comes with personal responsibilities. Our hearts are restless until they rest in the painful responsibilities of faithful love.