On Prof Jiang and Love
I watched Prof Jiang's diary of a CEO and I was particularly taken on the way he talked about his wife. Love as redemption, which is an excellent theme from Crime and Punishment. His love for his wife and his esteem for her, was a shining light out of all the darkness he spoke about.
It got me thinking. and this will be sheer off the cuff rumination, not beautifully written at all. So bear with me.
I'm from the millenial generation told to work hard, "You can do anything a man can". And we did. We worked hard, we got good grades, we topped all the tests, and now have good careers. We had planned all our lives by 17, and did all the things "right", the things our dads, our mothers, society said we should do.
And per society, we have all the accoutrements of success. We have the degrees. Some of us have the papers, the title, the money.
But it is all hollow, hollow inside.
I thought I was the only one who was unhappy. But recently, I discovered that one of my best friends from high school, is similarly lost.
I was standing on a high school track, running laps to workout and wondering if maybe my friends and I were focused on the pieces of chess and had missed the whole game.
We were so careful about avoiding risk. Don't have a premarital sex. Don't have a baby with a stranger. Don't go on those dates. But maybe there are some risks you have to take to be human.
Maybe we should have had sex with more strangers, dated more unviable men who were difficult and depressed, allowed more mess into our lives.
Maybe we were so busy writing our futures, predicting moves 5 weeks, and 50 years into the future, that we missed the transformative power of love.
That love is something that happens when you are not looking. That it gives you things you didn't think you could have. That it can transform you and the one you love into something you couldn't dream of being.
And this is the problem with dating apps. Think of the man most women hope to marry: tall, intelligent, financially stable, emotionally attuned. Think of the woman most men hope to marry, beautiful, young, likely no other children. A man who fell madly in love with a divorced woman, with two children, who was physically unprepossessing would be mocked. But that is what Paul Dirac did- when he fell in love with Margit Wigner (Manci). Dirac was a theoretical physicist, who was so unadept with women that he couldn't understand why men would dance with women at parties.
He was cold, lacked feeling. And Manci said he deserved a "nobel prize in cruelty". But they kept talking. She kept trying. He told her" You should know that I am not in love with you. It would be wrong for me to pretend that I am, as I have never been in love I cannot understand fine feelings."
But over time, things changed. Love transformed. After visiting her in Budapest he wrote, "I felt very sad leaving you and still feel that I miss you very much. I do not understand why this should be, as I do not usually miss people when I leave them.”
Shortly after he married her. And their love, her devotion to him, his adoration of her, not only solidified his life; it made him happy. Both of them were happy, really.
The point I think is love is what happens when you forget all your preconditions and specifications. All that planning. And give yourself up to randomness, to chance, to risk.
Maybe, we all, need to take a few more risks.