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The value of friendships should neither be underestimated nor overestimated. You can achieve unlimited psychuous pleasures and happiness through romantic love alone, without any close friend beyond your love partner. Friendships alone, no matter how valuable or extensive, can never deliver the full spectrum of values and happiness available from a single, friendship-based romantic love.
The following two ingredients will deliver a prosperous, happy life:
In other words, you need only your productive work and a romantic-love partner for a full-range, prosperous, happy life. But productive work is a basic requirement for achieving romantic love. In that sense, productive work is a cause and romantic love is an effect.
Productive work is the basic requirement for human values. And romantic love and psychuous pleasures are the rewards for achieving those values. ...You cannot experience self-esteem, happiness, and romantic love without productive work. But you can experience self-esteem, happiness, and productive work without romantic love.
Friendship can offer great values and pleasurable experiences. Yet, friendships, especially close friendships, can in certain cases drain valuable time needed for high levels of business, creativity, and achievement. In a demanding business or intensely creative work, a person with a valuable romantic-love partner can often reach higher levels of achievement and happiness with few or no other friends. Friendships, moreover, are subject to errors that can turn into liabilities which drain your time, productiveness, efficacy and, thus, happiness. But value-generating, business friendships are generally the happiest, most exciting, most valuable of all relationships, except the romantic-love relationship.
In the end, reality prevails over life. The total experience of every person's life always moves toward justice as reality asserts itself: Productive, rational individuals increasingly gain prosperity, love, and happiness from life. Conversely, unproductive, irrational individuals increasingly lose prosperity, love, and happiness -- no matter what the surface appearances.
"That is a profound thought about life and justice," my father said. "I never saw that connection. It seems to me that values are the key to life and love...and justice. Can you talk more about values and love?"
Abstract values of a friendship are normally not negotiable for tangible and material values. Likewise, tangible and material values normally cannot be converted into abstract values. Occasional exceptions do exist. Exceptions occur mainly in romantic-love relationships because the intense physical/psychological interactions tend to pull abstract values and material values closer together. At times, within a romantic-love relationship, those values can become interrelated. For example, emotional and sexual love provided by one partner can tangibly increase the creative, productive output of the other partner. Likewise, certain tangible values can amplify abstract values. For example, creative and productive accomplishments of one partner can increase the emotional love, sexual exhilaration, and psychuous pleasures of the other partner.
Generally, in a friendship or romantic-love relationship, an exchange of abstract values -- be they healthy, neurotic, or a mixture -- is taken for granted and occurs naturally. In friendship relationships, much of the abstract value interchange consists of open, casual exchanges of ideas and suggestions -- a type of easy two-way communication that often is mutually valuable. Indeed, such exchanges of ideas and suggestions occur in most good conversations between friends or lovers.
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