The night before I left for America last November, my boyfriend spent the evening continuing his unending pursuit to understand the philosophy behind my morals and daily opinions.  He refused to accept that I had no definite philosophy behind any of it.  Perhaps he strives to understand how he can love someone who he considers a Republican, never mind the fact that I find that a bit insulting.  I’m independent, thank you very much.

I told him that, since he said he’d actually like to write letters, that he can ask me these questions in letters, and I will answer them better since I will have the time to sit down and think about my answers.  I am virtually unable to answer questions like that while thinking on my feet.  Perhaps it’s because I’ve never taken the time, but it’s more likely to be because I am easily intimidated in deeper conversations.  I know little will come out of debating other than someone thinking less of me for my opinions.  Generally I find that with my boyfriends I end up feeling as though my opinions are unintelligent and illogical.  I suppose that is what comes with dating an economist.

So I write to him: What you might not see, my love, is that while you analyse people and the world through books on philosophy and politics and logic that line your shelves, I can look at the world through no other means than love.  How we love, our lack of love, our inability to, or our prejudices concerning love, I believe, make up the drive behind our decisions.  It’s not always even the love of people.  Love is entirely immaterial.  Some people love the feeling power and influencing the world around them gives them.  Some people love themselves more than anything else, and hat will naturally be their driving force.

Perhaps I have trouble voicing opinions on things like politics and philosophy because I love having people like me.  In college I got tired of being criticised for saying anything positive about writers like Ayn Rand, because clearly it meant I was a right wing conservative nut.  I know that opinions and views on life are like clothes, as silly as it may sound: what works for one person may not work for another.  So much of what I base my decisions on is what I think is ‘right’, tempered by what I considered acceptable in the society in which I live.  Anthropologically, I see nothing wrong with molding to the socially accepted norm.

So I suppose we will continue to go on looking at the world in completely different way.  He will look for the logic and I will look for the beauty.  But if we look at the Golden Ratio then we also know that there is logic and beauty, and any mathematician worth his salt will defend that there is beauty in logic.

And isn’t a great relationship, after all, supposed to made up of parts that complement each other?