The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

1. A rapist; a bigamist; a seductionist; any criminal offender against the person of a woman. 2. A peaceful convict (humorous).

- american underworld dictionary - 1950

Any person that enters into the scope of your physical admiration, no matter how brief the encounter. Some say it's who you sleep with, have sex with, have a physical history with. Others say it is someone who has an appreciation for an idea, object or person. I say it's someone who breathes you in as you breathe out, and who you turn right back around and inhale them back into you.

We have too flat a vocabulary for those people we become physically, emotionally, or intelectually entangled with.

"Oh ho my friend," I hear you say. "You should hear the euphemisms that the trendy twenty-something café set use. CSP. Fuckbuddy. Friends with benefits. Booty call. Standing arrangement. To name but a few! They have a rich vocabulary! You clearly ought to drink more lattés."

Actually, I am a fully paid-up member of the trendsters association, with a collection of frequent sippers cards to prove it. We don't lack variety. We lack depth.

By which I mean, specifically, we lack words to describe those relationships, sexual or otherwise, that exceed friendship; transcend casual sex; involve tenderness and intimacy; generate insight and mutual care; nourish, surprise, delight, and grow us; yet do not demand monogamy or commitment — at least, not the traditional, to-infinity-and-beyond form of commitment we typically mean. How do we describe the people who are these things to us?

Well. Lovers. The full richness of these relationships is summed up in that simple concept: a lover.

I often wonder, sitting at the trendy cafe that only hires 17-25 year old girls with piercings and tattoos, listening to the other Gen X/Y/Z/whatever kiddies awkwardly mumble the words fuckbuddy, or backslider, or whatever crassness is flavour of the month, whether they really feel like their relationship with this person is that, well, simple. Do they not enjoy the comfort of a warm arm across their chest as they sleep? Enjoy conversations over glasses of wine? Talk in ever-so-slightly charged terms about their hopes and dreams, the children each may one day want to have, should the right person ever come along? Smile quietly when they wake up with someone's breath warming the back of their neck? Want that person's comfort, insight, and advice on those days that break us?

Do they really, honestly, inside their head and heart, see this person as simply someone they fuck?

"Hey, what's 'making love'? What a woman's doing while you fuck her! Hur hur hur hur!"

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not gonna snag you into some utopian vision where we all frolic in a polyamorous Arcadia of emotional clarity and sexual fulfilment. I have had sexual partners where the suggestion of intimacy and mutual vulnerability would have made us laugh so hard we'd have had to stop screwing long enough to get a glass of water. Sometimes you meet someone with whom there is intense physical, lustful, mutual desire, but who truly wants nothing more than no-strings-attached, no-holds-barred, no-kink-too-kinky, no-kissing-above-the-neck, hard, loud, sweaty, bestial, panting, grunting, screaming sex.

And believe me. That is just fine by me.

But even those profoundly shallow, utterly mammalian relationships have a buzz-killing habit of drifting into emotionally complex territory if not kept under tight control. In fact, every relationship, friendship, even familial bond, will inevitably drift through a wide, largely unlabelled landscape of attitudes and emotions, interacting with our neuroses and insecurities, our emotional baggage, the issues of daily life, and the unending, life-long tension between loneliness and independence. It is this inherent fluidity and subtlety of our emotional attachments to the people that participate in our lives that is failed by our anaemic, fornicatorily-obsessed, quasi-bohemian vocabulary.

Every single relationship is genuinely unique, and so is the way we feel about, think about, and look at each significant person in our lives. Yet there is just one word that includes the full sweep of intimate relationships: lover. A person with whom you have romances, affairs (sometimes even love affairs), flings, rendez-vous', tumbles, and even monogamous relationships. I would hope, if someone one day does become the right person, that they would be my partner, and perhaps my spouse, but will always, until the very end, remain my lover.

When B is little, his mother says, "You are a lover, not a fighter."

He takes this to heart. Though growing up in his neighborhood, he does have to learn to fight. They all do, girls and boys.

"There wasn't any discrimination because we were ALL poor."

Mostly Caucasian and Native American. Everyone was poor so they mostly fought the next town over, as a group. And each other, of course.

B says they would lure other kids to stop and fight, near the Jesus is Lord sign. Cars driving by. The border between his little community and the next. His community was poorer and had more kids.

They had a kid who was huge. He would hide until the car would stop and then come out. The poor town kids would win.

Everyone hunted and fished and canned. Or starved. Cows were butchered two blocks from his house. He has lived in his neighborhood for over 60 years.

I wish I had that sort of root system.

He wandered off when he was three or four and into the church. During service. About 4 blocks from his house.

His mother and stepfather found him eventually. His stepfather probably beat him for that infraction. And when he felt like it.

If you beat a small child without reason, guess what. They either give up and cringe, or they go to oppositional defiance. We will do whatever the hell we want because the adults aren't rational or fair, so fuck them. He says he was confined to the yard every day. The yard backed on woods. He'd head into the woods. When he came back, it was all "Oh, I didn't hear you." Didn't matter. If he was going to get beaten anyhow, why make excuses? He stopped telling adults anything.

All three did, he and his sibs. They walked out on the log boom. "My mother would have killed me if she knew." Might as well, right? The adults hit for no reason, and I feel like spitting in the face of whoever invented this world.

Later he tells me: "We would release the boom."

"The LOG BOOM? While you were ON IT?"

He grins.

"You couldda bin killed."

He shrugs.

"You couldda fallen in the water." The water here is cold. You can live 50-60 minutes if you are lucky. Then hypothermia.

He shrugs again. "We DID fall in the water."

"She-it. Your mother was right."

"Well. We survived it."

Yeah. We survived our childhoods. And our young adulthoods, spitting in the face of whoever invented this world.

And we follow the rules, sometimes. Unless we think up something better, or a work around, or we in a bad mood.

He doesn't fight much any more. But he could. And he doesn't tell anyone much of anything, almost ever.

Timber dictionary logging terms Log boom is not there.

Log boom is different from log jam.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_(navigational_barrier)

#34: Iron Noder

Lov"er (?), n.

1.

One who loves; one who is in love; -- usually limited, in the singular, to a person of the male sex.

Gower.

Love is blind, and lovers can not see The pretty follies that themselves commit. Shak.

2.

A friend; one strongly attached to another; one who greatly desires the welfare of any person or thing; as, a lover of his country.

I slew my best lover for the good of Rome. Shak.

3.

One who has a strong liking for anything, as books, science, or music.

"A lover of knowledge." T. Burnet.

 

© Webster 1913.


Lo"ver (?), Lo"ver*y (?), n.

See Louver.

[Obs.]

Bp. Hall.

© Webster 1913.

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