The Pedestal

A friend of mine wrote this poem recently, and it got me thinking about people's relationships, both romantic and platonic.

Nice boy, what makes you think you could pursue a goddess?
Offer gifts, quake in her presence, avert your gaze, grovel,
you in your lowly state could never please her.
She’s transcendent, she's out of your reach.
You’ll never have her,
ignored despite the fact it was you that made her.
You’re so afraid to be impious,
to forget what you've claimed as your place.
Try looking at her with confidence, humbled and human,
vulgar, chaotic, remarkable.
The girl doesn’t want to be what you’ve made her,
but the goddess will never love you.

Growing up, I used to say that 'girls are dumb', because they always chase after guys that are jerks, and ignore the nice guys. Later on after taking some psychology courses in college, I refined, 'dumb', and posited that many if not most women are emotional masochists. However, it's not just women, but men as well. All of us seek perfection. We chase the unattainable, and ignore the attainable. It's a huge turnoff if someone actually is interested in us. And why not? If that person is interested in ME, can she really be worth all that much?

We chase the unattainable, we chase those who hurt us. Possibly because we are emotional masochists, we enjoy the pain. But that's not really it, other than as a punch line. We don't enjoy the pain, no one enjoys the pain. We seek perfection, and the only ones that are perfect are the people that we can never get close enough to to see the flaws. And so we chase them. But as the above poem asserts, are we in fact so addicted to that ideal, that perfection that cannot exist, that we have to create it? We ignore and blind ourselves to reality, we put the object of our desires up on a pedestal so high that we in the end create the unattainableness we seek, because in reality, almost never is someone really unattainable if we have the right mindset. Maybe they aren't interested, maybe they are already taken. But not unattainable for the reason of being superior.

If we could all get rid of the idea that we are inferior, and realize that that pedestal is created by our own mind, then suddenly the unattainableness goes away. But we won't, because then we'd have to face the even worse reality, that our God or Goddess is actually not perfect, but just as flawed as us.