All's Fair in Love and War

As a child I couldn't make any sense of this statement, 'All's fair in love and War'. This just always seemed sort of crazy to me.

But as I grew up into my teens and beyond it made more sense to me than for most other young people simply because they hadn't faced death yet maybe. But, for me, death was very real. So, I became much more serious about staying alive than many of my friends and acquaintances that didn't make it for one reason or another along the way. So, now at 64 I look around me and I can't believe sometimes just how many I knew are now gone.

So, now when I revisit, "All's fair in love and war", I finally completely understand what this means.

It means that both love and war are about the survival of individuals and nations and that if you aren't mature enough to deal with life maturely at every point, you often don't survive both as nations and as individuals.

Also, I used to believe as a child that there was only one person for you that you found and married and that was it and you were happy ever after sort of like in Disney movies. But, in real life I saw that for 99% of the people that simply wasn't true.

A Catholic priest who counseled people throughout his career and who before that was district Attorney of Santa Cruz County in California once share with me about this. He said, " Only about 20 percent of people are actually suited to get married to one person and to stay with that person for life. Then you have the next 20 percent that might be happy as sequential monogamists married one at a time to 2 or more people. Then you have another 20 percent that might only be happy for short periods of time in a live in relationship. And finally you have people that aren't going to be happy living with anyone at all ever. He said, "This is what humanity really is. all the billions of us."

I think I agree with this assessment even though you don't hear this from many people because it is a depressing assessment of mankind.

But, the one thing that I have observed is that, "There are the quick and the lonely." This is an obvious look at life here on earth.



I guess I have always been one of the quick as relationships go. Once I had dated from age 15 and gone steady with 3 girls sequentially and fallen in love and all that and also in my 20s come very close to suicide because I had to face the deep confusion regarding all this. I came to realize simply, like in the song, "If you can't be with the one(s) you love, love the one you're with". I took this to heart and found I could stay alive between 21 and 25 by "loving the one I was with". Now, society doesn't directly approve of this but it is a "survival technique" for the "extremely brokenhearted" like I was at the time. But this is how I found a way to stay alive from 21 to 25 until I got married and had a son.

As I look around me at the wreckage of most people's lives I realize that I have always been extremely lucky. There are always others who might not see my life in this way. But, for me, I see my life as being an extremely lucky and fortunate one, especially as I gaze at the wreckage of most people's lives that I have known.

It is as if God really wanted me to learn a whole bunch and to travel the world and to survive all the changes and craziness of life and I find myself today still alive and amazed at the adventure God has seen fit to give me. So, just remember if you are mature enough, "All's fair in Love and War!"

Because understanding this is the key to individual and national survival. Idealistically, I wish this were not the case. But, if you want to actually survive in this world it can be helpful to see life as it actually is rather than as some kind of fairy tale.  It is my experience that "Fairy tales kill adults" even as they help children survive to adulthood.