Lust fosters romance, love is tedious

As many of you know I moved out of my old rented flat, which was gloomy so I had to keep the lights on all day.  Then I stumbled into my present 19th floor flat, which is so bright and airy. Two of my old buddies have been inviting me to breakfast for a long time now because they want to see my new place. Finally I found the courage to cook breakfast for them but don’t complain, I warned.

Longganisa and sunny-side-up eggs and rice, that’s the menu I thought of.  I could cook rice because I had a rice cooker.  I can always fry eggs as long as they’re sunny-side up and my guests don’t mind one broken egg yolk.  I don’t know why but I always manage to break the second egg yolk in the transfer from frying pan to plate. My buddies were sweet. They didn’t seem to mind.

But we like to have breakfast because we are old friends. I met them both a long time ago in some association I belonged to when I was president of an ad agency and we’ve kept that friendship alive. Breakfast with them is always wonderful because they are very intelligent but not pretentious. 

We talked about many things that afflict the business community. The inability of people to look inside themselves and know themselves well. For me  —  and they both agreed — a leader cannot be a good leader unless he or she has that ability. You cannot know other people until you know yourself well. Then you can grant spaces for differences between you. You can even understand the differences. 

We also agreed that one of the flaws of Filipinos is the ability to always look at the previous administration or leader and point an accusing finger, saying, “This is his or her fault.”  All leadership has its strong and weak points. We should always focus on the strong points, those that made him or her successful. It’s like we have to learn to see the good things about people and focus on those because those are the traits that others need to emulate.  And the bad points? Let’s not ignore them but learn not to make too big a deal out of them.

Then we also talked about other topics.  I said I am of the age where I look back a lot and analyze. One of my observations, I said, is we marry out of lust, not love. Of course, we were so young, one of them said.  What else is there when you’re young? The other objected saying, No, lust is when you see the other party in bed.  Love is when you put her on a pedestal. 

No, I said, you suffer from the Madonna-whore syndrome, an affliction common to men.  But the other one agreed that he had married out of lust. Lust is romantic, I thought, but love is tedious. Love is a mixture of responsibility (you said “till death do us part” once and you intend to keep that promise), which leads to commitment, which requires staying through thick or thin and doing one’s duty regardless of what happens. Love means the total surrender of your freedom.

We could not resolve it because we got to talking about someone’s genealogy and how his branch of the family came into being by actually taking a “healthy” point of view towards lust. Their area recognized the difference between tenants and landlords.  The tenants in an indirect way offered their daughters to the landlords and many of the landlords accepted the generous offer paying back through attention which, among other things, took the form of occasional tips and a more or less constant increase in the food of the tenant’s family, a rather articulate quid pro quo.  But those were in the old days. We are, after all, old now.

But after they left, as I was washing saucepans, I thought about my point of view on the difference between lust and love. Lust fosters romance. The chocolates, flowers, whimsy that come with “falling in love” are very visible signs of lust, desire. Lust is the exciting part of human relationships. When it disappears and we look at each other and see immediately the other’s big stomach, hears loud snoring, sees the mess left behind that we have to clear up, knows the boredom that descends hearing the same joke again, that is love.

So what do you choose?  Lust or love?  Me?  I choose to be an old maid but with happy children!  By the way, if you want to hear me talk on my life and the messes I made come to Stemtech’s Monthly Assembly at SMX AURA at Bonifacio Global City.  You may bring friends.  It’s free.  It will be on Friday, June 20, at 2 p.m.  Please RSVP 0927-9780501 or 09204704754.  It is open to the public.  See you there!

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