LOVE DEFICIT AND HOW TO OVERCOME IT

A love deficit is like any other:

• noun. the amount by which a sum of money falls short of the required amount. the amount by which expenditures or liabilities exceed income or assets. a lack or shortage; deficiency. a disadvantage, impairment, or handicap: The team’s major deficit is its poor pitching.

A lack, shortage, or deficiency of love is a love deficit. And you’ve got one.

Now what? Blame your parents? Not so fast.

Growing up in America, for us mid-century modern men, included brothers, sisters, and girlfriends along with moms and dads.

For the initiated, mid-century parents weren’t into family planning. They had expectations to live up to after World War Two and Korea.

Those expectations created the now famous Baby Boom. You’ve heard of it?

Boom was the sound in the house with four kids.

Did my parents have a love deficit with each other? From high school sweethearts getting married based on love letters from the Korean War, they tied the knot after my dad made sergeant and became eligible for married housing.

My early years were spent in a Quonset Hut, which I still believe is a superior construction design for some reason.

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One brother had odd dating rituals.

It started with driving by a girl’s house at night and honking the horn.

No love deficit there.

The only way to make him stop was for the girl to go out on a date for the sake of peace and quiet.

That was a big win in the books, and time for a new challenge.

He lost out on his next project to a guy named Malcom the Falcon. He drove a Ford Falcon, which passed for a Mustang in the right light.

She was a girl ahead of her time, or the right one in the wrong place.

If she didn’t get her homework done she’d call in a bomb threat to the school during third period before lunch.

One day she came in with colored nostrils. I asked why after she showed me.

“I snorted mescaline.”

She was a senior, the sort of senior who looked thirty-five and wanted more from life as time slipped away.

I was a sophomore, the sort who got dizzy around beautiful women who didn’t know how beautiful they were in their small town.

If she had a plan on running off and invited me, I might have gone. She wanted more than some guy who drove around at night honking a horn, or some guy in a Falcon.

But what?

Understanding Love Talk

Sometimes thoughts get lost in translation.

You say one thing, they hear another, then it’s an hour of explaining.

Say you’re driving around town and check your passenger for directions.

“Which way at the light?”

“Right. No left. Wait, turn right.”

It might as well have been, “Woof, woof woof, woof.”

Followed by, “Cluck, cluck cluck.”

Or it might devolve into who had the better parents, a mom and dad who had their dreams answered with the perfect daughter after a sketchy son, or the parents of a horn honker with a sidekick.

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Some of us have the advantage of early education in a love deficit.

Part of it is breaking up with the same girl a few times in high school. If they marry some guy the day before graduation, it’s a signal you need to pick up on.

If the same thing happens in college, pay attention. Breaking up a few times with a girl in college, after your high school torch flames out, is a trend.

Do you reflect on the sameness and let it go?

Or, do you drive by their campus apartment in the back of a pick-up truck and pitch shaken up bottles of Michelob exploding against the walls while they’re inside with a railroad conductor?

After that, do you tidy up, propose marriage, then drop out of college to move across the entire country, break up again, get back together, then break up for god when you find out she’s pregnant with her and her neighbor’s baby?

True Love Deficit

From the inside, love is more than holding hands and whispering secrets.

Sometimes you see the other person like you’ve never seen them before, even if you’ve known them for decades.

If you’ve having a tense moment, don’t tighten it up by unloading every slight and disappointment you’ve had, and blame the other person.

That’s their deficit, not yours.

A precious baby can grow up to be a normal person.

Unfortunately they can also grow up wondering where all the precious went.

And they blame you?

Whether newly weds, old married people, or a few dates into a new relationship, man or woman, work out your bullshit enough to avoid blaming others.

Everyone carries their own load; no one needs extra.

Love says, “Hold my beer.”

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