Love and shallowness

A commenter at HUS was lamenting the lack of male interest in women's deeper qualities and blaming female shallowness on this when I pointed out that lack of interest was actually a good thing because most women are shallow.  This didn't go over so well.

VD, it’s men like you who make me throw up. Thanks.  I totally understand feminists now. Why chase after men? Maybe you’ll be lucky and find a guy like Joe who will stay with you through thick/thin, but most men are like VD, who say, ” oh, you can read Dante while getting you hair done.”

Why thank you, I’m so honored. All I wanted in life was to be a pretty ornament hung up in someone’s kitchen. Forget men, hopefully I’ll make enough in my life to buy some vibrators/dildos because, really, what are men these days?

I can’t believe that I hoped for something more, depth, style, substance or compatibility. I can’t believe I used to put love on a pedestal as something beautiful that just happens, or believe that relationships included two people who deeply trusted in each other, who swore to be together through whatever problems may come.

I wasted all my childhood reading “Dover Beach” and Phillip Pullman’s “His dark Materials”. Love isn’t real. Life is shallow and really what’s the point of this site? this conversation? this blog? Why do we care if the world denigrates into meaningless hookups? There is nothing more.

However, there is no reason anyone should believe there is an intrinsic difference between a man who cares for his ailing wife and a man who isn't concerned about his wife's lack of interest in reading La Commedia in the Florentine vulgar.  If she prefers Sudoku, where is the problem in that?  (Now Farmville over B3, that's what I'll never understand.)  After all, for all we know, the ailing wife is a devotee of Hee-Haw re-runs while her husband, when he is not occupied with his care duties, translates Shakespeare into ancient Sumerian.  

Part of this woman's essential problem is revealed by her childhood reading. Those whose childhood foundation was more Pullman than Lewis are intellectually poisoned.  In this case, the resulting perspective is downright monstrous; I have far more contempt for this female mentality than for the shallowest smiling bubblehead out there.  She is observably an angry elitist who is furious at the world for valuing what it values rather than what she has to offer it.  The monstrosity stems from her implicit denial of the possibility that shallow people of either sex, who happen to make up most of the world, are deserving of love.  And yet, despite her cruel elitism, we can see that she simply has no clue about love or what it is.

Love doesn’t “just happen”. That is infatuation. Love is commitment. Love is a choice. Love is one sacrifice voluntarily offered after another, for years on end. But those who are full of pride, anger, and bitterness cannot be expected to have any idea what love is.