Release release cry smile heal fun. RRCSHF. (I'm feeling a little abbreviated in the midst of this whirlwind of change.)
Oh! Found some descriptions closer to my heart's ideal: Romantic Friendship. Friendship. Boston marriage, hah.
Anglo-American Romantic Friendship
“Perfectly respectable Victorian women wrote to each other in terms such as these: ‘I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you… that the expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish.’ They recorded the ‘furnace blast’ of their ‘passionate attachments’ to each other… They carved their initials into trees, set flowers in front of one another’s portraits, danced together, kissed, held hands, and endured intense jealousies over rivals or small slights… Today if a woman died and her son or husband found such diaries or letters in her effects, he would probably destroy them in rage or humiliation. In the nineteenth century, these sentiments were so respectable that surviving relatives often published them in elegies…”
-- Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were [66]
“[In the 1920’s] people’s interpretation of physical contact became extraordinarily ‘privatized and sexualized,’ so that all types of touching, kissing, and holding were seen as sexual foreplay rather than accepted as ordinary means of communication that carried different meanings in different contexts… It is not that homosexuality was acceptable before; but now a wider range of behavior opened a person up to being branded as a homosexual...The romantic friendships that had existed among many unmarried men in the nineteenth century were no longer compatible with heterosexual identity; old frontier habits of sharing beds or ‘rolling up together around campfires to keep each other warm’ were ruled out of bounds. Increasingly, either genital sex between men or careful physical and emotional distancing ‘crowded out more sublimated erotic relations’ and replaced more nuanced male friendships.”
-- Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were [195]
“These women [in the United States before 1900] had no difficulty in distinguishing sentimental gesture from true romantic friendship. When … they told each other, ‘I love you,’ they meant precisely that. When they wept for sorrow or joy at the loss or the return of the beloved friend, their tears were real… Their language and behavior are incredible today: Thus such friendships are usually dismissed by attributing them to the facile sentimentality of other centuries, or by explaining them in neat terms such as ‘lesbian,’ meaning sexual proclivity. We have learned to deny such a depth of feeling toward any one but a prospective or an actual mate. Other societies did not demand this kind of suppression.”
-- Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men [84]
“[I]f women on a large scale now had no hindrance in their freedoms, they might find kindred spirits, other women, and provide homes and solve the problem of loneliness for each other. For the first time, love between women became threatening to the social structure.”
-- Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men [238], referring to Boston marriages
“friendship, n. … 2. the highest degree of intimacy.”
-- Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1755 From this site
Some words of others I had saved in a file but wanted to delete. So I saved them here (hmm, does that count? :-p).
"I am that which I think myself to be."
Ideals are reflected to us from the unseen spirit. The laws of matter and spirit are not the same. One can be broken, but not the other. To the extent that ideals are kept is your future assured.
It was never intended that man should suffer. He has brought it upon himself by disobeying the laws of nature. He knows them so cannot plead ignorance. Why does he break them? Because he does not pay attention to those ideals flashed to him from the Infinite Spirit.
Life is but one continuous unfoldment, and you can be happy every step of the way or miserable, as you please; it all depends upon how we entertain those silent whisperings that come from we know not where. We cannot hear them with mortal ear, but from the silence they come as if they were dreams, not to you or me alone, but to everyone. In this way the grandest thoughts come to us, to use or abuse. So search not in treasured volumes for noble thoughts, but within, and bright and glowing vision will come to be realized now and hereafter.
You must give some hours to concentrated, consistent, persistent thought. You must study yourself and your weaknesses.
- Theron Q. Dumont
* As soon as the love relationship does not lead me to me, as soon as I in a love relationship do not lead another person to himself, this love, even if it seems to be the most secure and ecstatic attachment I have ever experienced, is not true love. For real love is dedicated to continual becoming.
* It's not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something. May I suggest that it be creating joy for others, sharing what we have for the betterment of personkind, bringing hope to the lost and love to the lonely.
* One does not fall 'in' or 'out' of love. One grows in love.
* Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
* We need not be afraid to touch, to feel, to show emotion. The easiest thing in the world is to be what you are, what you feel. The hardest thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don’t let them put you in that position.
* We need others. We need others to love and we need to be loved by them. There is no doubt that without it, we too, like the infant left alone, would cease to grow, cease to develop, choose madness and even death.
L Buscaglia
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