Metaphorical Description of the Development of the Capacity for Love

I wrote this some time ago. When I first wrote it, I opened with a preface that claimed it was a two-part story. I pointed out that part one would probably be unpopular. Because of that, part two would sound insulting if for no other reason than that it’s posed as a sequel to part one. It still is a two part story. And the same relationship will probably be true. Feel free to voice your own opinion.

Part One.
In their youth, people are flexible and impressionable creatures. It’s a miracle that children ever manage to make it out of the sandbox without having killed each other with plastic shovels over arguments about candy, killing bugs, building castles, and making mud pies. But, by some freak chance of evolution, the miracle happens more often than not. The kids DO make it out of the sandboxes, leave the shovels behind, and move on to kicking the crap out of each other with much more dangerous weapons.

Strangely, it’s all uphill from there. All of childhood is spent learning how and how not to deal with other people. From such simple lessons as “stealing will make you enemies” to “being nice will make you friends,” slowly but surely, kids learn that other people exist to do more than please them. Or, in the very least, some of the more gifted kids manage that lesson.

Then puberty hits and replays the whole drama. It’s basically the same story as childhood. People suddenly have to come to terms with the fact that people are attracted to and must interact with other people in new and often disturbing ways that didn’t exist before. At first, it is a complete mystery to most that those other people do not exist solely for their own pleasure. It seems instinctively obvious that other people are sex objects. The idea that they might see the world differently is generally about as clear to the inexperienced person as the difference between a sandcastle and a mud pie was in the sandbox. Back then, intense dramas played out when the bully thought that the sand making up the castle would make an excellent mud pie. And he was right. Just not in the eyes of the person who built the sandcastle. But it took an awful lot of sandcastles being built for everyone to realize that the mud pie turns back into a sandcastle just as easily as it turned into the mud pie the day before. The only real secret was picking friends who either liked mud pies, or friends who liked sand castles.

When the sandbox arena grows to include sex/love though, everyone is quick to notice that there are a LOT more possible ingredients to work with than just sand and water. This time though, experience and society have already been so good as to inform everyone that the secret is just to find proper teammates. But society inevitably is either too vague, or worse, too restricting, to actually provide a helpful answer on what too look for in teammates. As a result, picking the “friends” to build castles, mud pies, whatever, can be a very, very complicated process. But it doesn’t go any faster being shy.


Part Two.
Weeding out most of the bad teammate choices is pretty easy. They never even present themselves. The sandbox is plenty big enough to make playing with everyone not only unnecessary, but impossible.

And with a few encounters, it even becomes pretty easy to notice that maybe you just don’t get a rush feeling the squishy mud when making mud pies.

So you get bored with mud pies and just hang out with the castle makers from then on. Pretty soon you’ll start to notice that maybe even most castle makers are boring unless they like having a good set of turrets.

And then, as you get even more experience, you start to realize that even turret makers are kinda predictable unless they’re prone to add a good tower.

Right about then, courtyard design becomes fascinating.

Eventually, everything just seems unfinished without a moat.

And by the time the moat is dug and filled, you find that either you’ve just set up a life-sized, fully functional castle with possibly as small as a duo team…

…Or you’ve built yourself an excellent private fortress.



I have a lot of faith in two things. 1) You can’t rush building your castle, simply because you don’t know what it will look like until you finish it. Since it might eventually be a house for two, it would be wise to build it with space for both occupants. 2) If you try to rush build it anyway, you just end up with a small fortress that neatly anticipates the needs of its one designer but frightens everyone else away.