Thought Picnic: The Dignity of Choosing

The Mystery of Love

One thing I have always held sacrosanct is not interfering in relationships. There is a complex dynamic between people who choose and admire each other for all sorts of reasons that outsiders may never be able to fathom.

The book of Proverbs 30:18-19 in the Bible informs me quite clearly, in the following words:

There are three things that amaze me—
no, four things that I don't understand:
how an eagle glides through the sky,
how a snake slithers on a rock,
how a ship navigates the ocean,
how a man loves a woman.

In the King James Version, it is written as "and the way of a man with a maid."

In these times, relationships are so diverse that the singularity of heterosexuality is no longer the sole expression of love, nor the only way to choose a partner. The way people choose whom they love, and why, will always remain a mystery.

Duty Rather Than Spark

This is different again from arranged settings, where external parties make the decisions that the participants must adhere to. Familial, customary, societal, political, or financial responsibilities usually influence such unions. People then have to make the best of the cards they are dealt.

Arranged unions are borne of duty, and the spark that arises out of attraction and leads to falling in love hardly fits with this topic. I acknowledge that such unions exist, and that affection may well develop within them over time, but that is a different matter from autonomously finding love for oneself. My concern here is with those who choose, not those who are chosen for.

When Love Turns to Harm

Even where I have harboured misgivings about the suitability of a match, I have always been reluctant and reticent to express a view, except where abuse is evident, and a partner is endangered. By abuse, I mean both emotional abuse and domestic violence, for neither is conducive to a loving relationship, and both can lead to harm of different kinds, including fatalities.

People in such settings need to be extricated before irreparable damage is caused. In those cases, there is no reason to sacrifice the person to an age-old institution for the purpose of saving face; the institution is not worth a life, nor the quiet erosion of one.

I am aware of the difficulty in all of this, for it sits uneasily beside my own principle. If an outsider cannot truly fathom why two people choose each other, that same outsider can seldom read what passes behind their closed doors. Abuse is rarely performed for an audience.

Harder still, the one being harmed does not always recognise the harm; what others would name as abuse can feel, from the inside, like an ordinary texture of the relationship. There is also the matter of shame. To admit to being abused is to admit, as many feel it, that one chose poorly, and so the stigma keeps people silent and keeps them where they are. Choosing to leave is therefore rarely as simple as being told to go.

None of this changes my conclusion; it only tempers how I hold it. The exception for danger stands, but it must be exercised with care, patience, and an honesty about how little we can see.

Freedom to Love

Beyond that, you are free to choose whom you want, and I bid you Godspeed that the companionship will be happy, fulfilling, and wonderful. How a person loves another can only be a thing of joy.

An AI-generated infographic on the blog content. (Click to enlarge.)

I appreciate that there are people who would encounter great difficulty in understanding those who deviate from the heteronormative, but that difficulty does not invalidate the reality of it. Whether it is accepted or not, when one person meets another for the affairs of the heart and falls in love, it is always between them, to the exclusion of others.

A Hierarchy of Choices

It is a hard conversation that eventually has to be had: if your expectation of familial ties is to be chosen over an intimate companion, you have read the situation incorrectly. Once you understand the mystery that brings people together, you fall into a hierarchy of choices. A partner will be chosen first, over all other relationships, including close familial ties and long friendships. People should fall in line and respect that choice, just as they would expect others to respect their own.

What you will not get away with, then, is disrespecting, disparaging, ignoring, or deigning to reduce a significant other to insignificance. I know many will remain unpersuaded by that construct, and so they will land in the irrelevant scheme of things.

Relationships are acts of great determination on the part of the participants. The least that can be done is to accord them the courtesy of acknowledging that they exist, and to respect the one you know has chosen rightly for themselves.

In the end, this is only a plea for individual choice and the respect it is owed, and for the humility to accept that no one, however well-meaning, is equipped to choose better on another's behalf.

Postscript

Ignore this at your peril. The person who insists on knowing better, who meddles where they were not invited and talks down to the one another has chosen, does not preserve the relationship they disapprove of; they forfeit their place in it. You are not owed a seat at a table you keep trying to overturn. Respect the choice, or be left out of the life that choice builds.

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