Belonging

I don't understand the nature of emotional attachment to others. But I am finding lately that "belonging" seems to be the deepest motivating force of all. More so than the gratification of being admired, or having sense pleasures fulfilled, "belonging" to a group, or "belonging" with another person rules the day.

In "Irma LaDouce", a delightful film starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, Irma (MacLaine) is a resourceful green-stockinged streetwalker with a furry little dog. Irma is recruiting Lemmon's character to be her new boyfriend/pimp; she's quite determined that they be partners in "the business", and in bed at the end of the day. Of course Jack Lemmon asks why such an apparently self-sufficient young woman would need anyone to manage her affairs.

"Because everyone needs to belong with someone," she says, "just like [the doggie] belongs with me." I watched the movie twice.

If you look at people walking their dogs, especially if they have more than one dog, you see a group of belonging-beings together: the dogs and the people both look satisfied; they're in-synch; they're all part of a crew that's enjoying the world together. That coziness of association is so effortless that we often don't recognize it; but having no one else to belong to, we do feel somehow empty.

There's an initial attraction that draws us into Intentional relationships with other humans, as in a community of spiritual practitioners, or a life partnership. But the alliance doesn't last in the absence of compatible deeper purpose. If my sweetie's destiny takes him across the country, and I really need to do what I do here, things can't last. But if you sign up for a shared destiny, whether raising a family or starting a business or breeding racehorses—or vowing to explore the nature of self through the medium of relationship—things will last. There must be a purpose: you belong to it; and you belong to one another.

I don't know yet how to negotiate the tension of loving somone, but feeling (rightly, wrongly, delusionally—who knows?) that I'm Meant To Be with someone else. Not because of any lack of regard for the one I "merely" love, but rather because I sense our life purpose does not lie together. Perhaps there's nothing to do; things take their course, and disentangle naturally if not forced.