By Our Love

"Love is a response to our highest values and can be nothing else."

If so, then wouldn't it be madness for me to even think about any long-term relationships at this point? I have goals in my life. One of my goals is to never be at a place in my life where I have no higher goals for which to reach. My greatest fear in life is not death, loneliness, abandonment, any imagined torture but rather to stop living and yet continue to exist.

I look at the great herd of humanity and I am beyond disgusted. Christian, non-Christian, it doesn't matter. I look at the lives they live and find them contemptible, an insult to the gift that they've been given.

"Only I think that it's a sin to sit down and let your life go, without making a try for it."

They stumble and meander through life without any idea what they are doing or why they are doing. They never stop the ceaseless motion of life to consider whether they are actually moving towards anything. My greatest fear is to regress into one of 'those' people.

At this point, my goals are not so very high. I believe that at this point, I am too egalitarian, too generous, too free with what I will accept in other people. I do not demand enough, do not expect enough out of other people. And what can this mean but that I do not yet love myself sufficiently?

Some have told me that with wives and the important women of our lives, we must be gentle and kind. Perhaps, at some stage. But in the stage where I am at, the stage of selection, where I winnow out all my possibilities, it would be best to be brutally selective of what I desire in a woman.

And why shouldn't I be exceptionally picky? I know what I bring to the table. I demand equal value. My love is not pity or charity-based. It is not an act of goodwill. It is an act of supreme self-esteem, confidence and dare I say, the right kind of selfishness.

And so I can *afford* to be selective. What would I do in baseball if I knew that I could take as many strikes as I wanted without striking out? Why, I'd wait for my perfect pitch. I'd be the most patient hitter in the world. I'd wait for a pitch that I could put all my heart, all my guts, all my conviction and confidence in and drive that ball a country mile. Isn't that the same situation I face now? Why settle?

No, love is the response to our highest values. Everyday I feel it in my soul, an itch on the inside of my skull; my values grow daily. I am more today than I was yesterday. And I will be more tomorrow than today. Why end that now? Why make a decision based on my current value set?