Like stuffing your hand in a bee hive for a single drop of honey

"Mud can take you prisoner and the plains can bake you dry,
snow can burn your eyes, but only people make you cry." - "Born Under a Wandering Star," Paint Your Wagon

Close, emotional relationships are fraught with peril. The only part of the whole entanglement that is guaranteed is that will bring you pain. Like crossing the event horizon of a black hole, there is no escaping that grim fate. If you care, you will bleed for it in one form or another. It doesn't matter if they want to hurt you or if you want to hurt them. It will happen anyway. Affection is no defense. In fact, the deeper and more unreservedly one loves, the greater the scope of emotional buffets one will be forced to endure. In addition to metaphorically running naked down a city street paved with splinters and broken glass and thick with pedestrians clad in steel wool and nettles, a vehicle known up to that point by you as "Snookums"/"Honeybun"/"Hunky McStudpants"/"Sugar Snatch" is going to careen around the corner unexpectedly and pinion you to a handy building like a bug on a pin at least once. Sometimes, they'll throw it in reverse leaving you to contemplate how the delicate fractal pattern of your blood spatter gives way to the tire treads fading away over the pavement. Most of the time, they will be kind enough to grind you into the architecture for the next block or so in a deliberate progression of backing up just enough to take the pressure off before inching forward again until they get some expression of agony before starting the cycle again.

I'd surmise that there are scores of folks out there who'd take affront at such a bleak assessment of interpersonal bonds. How could I believe such horrible things about something so precious and life-affirming? It's the most wonderful thing in all existence. How dare I malign it so with saying the only fruit it never fails to bear is pain?! Unfortunately, except for the sots who've sucked enough helium and nitrous oxide from the middle of a big pile of pastel colored plushie animals they believe the universe just needs a huge hug and perhaps a cupcake to be utopia, they can't argue my conclusion. Instead, they shall rail how I'm being a pessimist, dwelling upon the negatives and assure me it really isn't that bad.

Sod off. It is precisely that bad no matter how you desire to spin the issue. For every song or poem penned in the froth of love and romance, there are a score given rise by emotions ripped in sharp, raw tatters and affections turned rotten and sour. Arguably, an entire genre of music has been birthed in this universal experience of pain; country-western. If one was to put all the structural timber of the Grand Ol' Opry through a wringer, you would get a substance so infused with cheap whiskey and tears that every vas deferens in a five mile radius would tie itself into a noose.

So why the bloody hells do we continue to do this to ourselves?! For a substantial span of my life I have maintained a skeptical if not adversarial relationship with the concept of love. Frequently, I have brooded over the demise of friendships and romances burning with the resolution to never throw myself back into the social Mangle again.

Invariably, I would discover an interest in someone new and my vow not to get entangled would be set to the side to watch with jaded eyes as I court pains both intimately familiar as well as horridly new.

I've concluded that humanity is encoded on a basic level to be bug-fuck nuts in terms of social groups. It is the premier form of gambling. No Skinner box could hope to match the unadulterated insidiousness of what we naturally put ourselves through. For some reason, the moments of serenity, contentment, and joy sizzle in the brain. It doesn't seem to matter how assured the pain is, how profound the pain is, or how frequent it is as long as there is the possibility of something pleasant in the future. It may never happen, but we seem to be predisposed from birth to crave it. Society reinforces the drive, a billion individuals groping blindly in the leap of faith that it's all worth it. A species of junkies in search of their next emotional fix.

Not that I've somehow divorced myself from the clamoring mob. I might have found a little jut of topography to perhaps gain a little perspective on the whole mess, but I'm just as firmly caught in the swarm.

Who knows, perhaps if you're lucky and willing to work for it the bumps and jostles along the way get lost in the slow, private smiles and quiet touches. It certainly seems that way.

I'm OK with that.