Single Lessons
“We learn what love is from movies and television, and it’s ruined love for us. Romantic comedies, all that shit, it’s ruined love. It’s taught us that we are incomplete people who need to find that one person in the whole world that will complete us. I promise you, there are thousands of people that are perfectly good matches for any one of you. And I don’t want to be completed. I’m working very hard to be a complete person every day, you know? I don’t wanna make you whole. I want you to come whole. . . . And I know I just said ‘cum hole.’”—Sarah Silverman, Speck of Dust (2017)
A friend of mine gave up on men in her mid-forties. She’d been in back-to-back relationships since she was thirteen. None of them good. So she threw in the towel. “Clearly I suck at this, John!” Of course she met the love of her life a few years later, and they’ve lived happily ever after since then. But before she met Mr. Right, she was single for a few years, truly single, for the first time in her life. She said it was enlightening, being single. She said she learned how to take responsibility for her own emotions: “Back in the day, if I woke up in a bad mood, I’d turn to the guy next to me and say: ‘I feel bad because you did X or you didn’t do Y.’ But when I was single, if I woke up in a bad mood, there was no one to blame. I had to stop blaming others for my sadness. Making others responsible for my happiness.”
If taking responsibility for your own emotions is like finishing Spiritual High School, what might we learn in Spiritual College? If Epictetus is to be believed, the next step is to get rid of the impulse to blame altogether: “Small-minded people habitually reproach others for their own misfortunes. Average people reproach themselves. Those who are dedicated to a life of wisdom understand that the impulse to blame something or someone is foolishness, that there is nothing to be gained in blaming, whether it be others or oneself. One of the signs of the dawning of moral progress is the gradual extinguishing of blame. We see the futility of finger-pointing.”
If getting over our obsession with finger-pointing is like finishing Spiritual College, what might we learn in Spiritual Grad School? If Kant is to be believed, the next step is to take responsibility for the happiness of others. Philosopher Susan Neiman summarizes his reasoning in Moral Clarity (2008): “Like most people, you’re likely to devote most of your attention to your own happiness (or lack thereof), and my perfection (or lack thereof). What if we simply switched? Devote yourself to my happiness and your own perfection, and I’ll do the same in return. In a world where everyone did that, both happiness and virtue would double.”
Learning to love yourself isn’t the greatest love of all.
—John Faithful Hamer, Love Is Not a Liquid Asset (2020)
