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If you've looked here before to find what I have to say about this person and about this relationship in my life, I'm sorry that I haven't filled in this gap in the expression of my personal life as of yet. It has not been a delay for any particular reason other than that of my procrastination; an area that Karen is patiently helping me mature in as I move on down this road out of the darkness of an uncritical mind. 

Now, about Karen and I...
As with anyone else, since I don't know everyone, I won't say that my partner is the greatest woman on the planet. As nice and as wonderful some people might think such statements are, it's really nothing but a bunch of sentimental nonsense and I'd rather just tell the truth. There's no way in the world that I could know whether or not she is the greatest woman that ever lived. 
    I won't say that we have a "perfect" relationship either though. If someone ever finds such a relationship, I'd appreciate being told so that we can all finally have some kind of scale upon which to weigh each of our relationships. Without the existence of such an example, all we can do is talk about the health or un-health of our own relationship relative to others and talk about what we think of it and how it is working or not working out for us. 

I love her very much. I am committed to her and to her health and well-being as an individual person and as my marriage partner. We have many interests in common and enjoy doing many things together. We like each other and we like being together, whether it's doing some planned, fun activity like hiking in RMNP or fossil digging (I'm more into that than she is, but we still like being together when I'm doing it even if she's not on that particular occasion), or meeting people and getting to know them and forming new friendships, or just sitting in the car on the way somewhere like the store for food shopping, or hanging around the house working on cleaning or whatever. 
    Even though neither of us has "arrived" and we occasionally fall quite short of our ideal, our true intention is to live with each other in such a way that we can be completely open, honest and real with our selves and with each other and to walk with a world view based entirely on critical thinking, an awareness and appreciation for the world in which we actually live and an attitude of love and compassion for self and others. 

An excerpt from another page here on my site... 
"...the statement, "I love every person" would mean something much different coming from a sexist than from an enlightened, liberated male homo sapien like my self who took his wife's last name when they got married because he (No, I wasn't just going along with it either. It was actually my idea.) wanted to make a statement by a man somewhere in history that said, "No, men are not more important than women!!". (that was not a plug for me, but for egalitarianism and for compassion and critical thinking)". 
    The point? I didn't just wake up yesterday. Nor did I just get liberated in the past year or so. I just wanted to display here in this section what my intentions have been from the very start in this relationship. At the time we were talking about the possibility of getting married, I asked her if we could use her last name instead of mine. I wanted to do something outrageous and make a difference, for the health and well-being of women, in this world. As of July, 2003, we've now been married for 6 years. To read more about my thoughts on this issue, please see my section on Patriarchy and Misogyny.

We don't believe in any concept of "fate". Whatever we do today is by our own, present choosing. Of course we are influenced by many various things (genetics, family upbringing, society, life experiences etc), but ultimately, we each make our own decisions and choose the path we will take. Nothing can be known for sure until it comes about. I can't say for sure whether or not we'll still be together, say 10 years down the road. In our relationship, we do not pretend that we will always love each other. We say that at this moment in time we are committed to love each other and we want to love each other and that we will try to love each other and that we will work on loving each other together. Where we're at in 10 years though still remains to be seen and we're not substituting pretending for actually getting there. We're not just letting it come upon us either. We're going there together, deliberately. Deliberately together. We intend to be together, working on continuing a healthy relationship, and that is why we are still together even to this day, not because of pretending. 

To finish out this section, here is an example of the kinds of conversations I get in with people from time to time about this relationship I have with Karen. This conversation (via e-mail ) took place in late May and Early June of 2003. The parts marked with Q: are comments and questions from someone else and the parts marked with A: are my responses....

Q: "is there ever a time for faith in any aspect of your life? What about the love of your wife, do you have faith that she loves you or do you require empirical evidence for this love?"

A: Certainly you can't be serious. Why must there be a conflict between faith and empirical evidence when there obviously actually is empirical evidence? Remember, faith is not something humans do with regard to things that are known for sure, but with regard to things that aren't. That is why faith comes up. Since they don't know for sure, and they want to be sure so badly that they are willing to forego critical thinking and pretend that they know for sure just to calm their nerves and satisfy their insatiable appetite for an absolute sense of security, whatever the cost to their intellect and the rest of their worldview.
    No, I don't have any faith what-so-ever in my wife's love. I know for sure that she loves me. Well, at least I know it as surely as I can know anything else in the natural world with regard to what people think and what people do. According to her track record in my life, I can say with confidence (though not with absolute certainty) that she will still love and care for me tomorrow. Will she? We will see when we wake up tomorrow. Certainly you must agree that the sun rising tomorrow is more certain than whether one person will still love another, right? However, we don't really even know "for sure" that the sun will rise tomorrow. Oh, it's most likely....almost sounds stupid to even put it into the category of unknowns though doesn't it? That's the rub. Since the future is open and since we all have choices, nothing in life is absolutely certain. So, people look for things outside of reality to lock on to and claim them as absolutely certain. Since they are outside of known reality though, at the end of the day, if we are going to be completely honest with our selves, we have to acknowledge that these absolute certainties which lie outside reality are not really as absolutely certain as we like them to be. We can be so convinced though that it is next to impossible to be that brutally honest with our selves and each other. For future reference though, if you ever think that I'm advocating a philosophy of "no knowledge = no action", please recall my answers to these questions...


1. Will the sun rise tomorrow?
Based on the nature of the star as we now understand it to be and based on the history of the star as we now know it, I would say that it will probably rise tomorrow morning. I am certain that, without any unforeseen intra-solar or interstellar events (in or on Sol {the name of our star, commonly known as the Sun}, in or on Earth, the solar system, the galaxy or anywhere else in the universe) or any changes in the basic physics of our universe that it will indeed rise tomorrow morning. 
    However, as certain as I am, based on all of the available data, I still will not claim to know for sure, with absolute certainty, that it will indeed rise tomorrow. Although to do so would indeed be an acceptable thing to do in our society (and even in the scientific community for the most part), it would still be a step outside the realm of critical thinking (a level-headed thought process which leads me to the conclusion that I am not absolutely certain with regard to the exact nature or future experiences or condition of certain persons, places, things or events since they have not yet come about which will be the only way for me to observe them and make a valid judgment). 

2. Will my wife still love me tomorrow?
Without duplicating the language of my answer to the question about the Sun rising, I'll just assume the same principles and say, "Most likely, yes, but I won't be absolutely certain until I get there".

Q: "I put faith in the love of my wife and I place trust in her based on this faith"

A: Interesting. I'd recommend rechecking the condition of your relationship if you really mean what it seems like you're saying here Chris. Your trust in "her" is based on your "faith" in her love? I guess maybe it's just a mixed up way of saying the same thing I say about my relationship with my wife, but if you really mean it like that, oh boy. In my case, I do not trust in my wife's behavior, but in my wife. I do not have faith in my wife, but I trust her. I trust her because of her track record in my life. Unlike in your faith condition, trust is not something that just comes about magically as the result of some other magical thing like faith. Trust is something which is placed in someone whom has shown their self to be trust-worthy.
    It's not a matter of faith because there are no unknowns involved. My wife has shown her self to be trust-worthy, so I trust her. Yes, my trusting her is based on the empirical evidence of her life lived out before me, with me, with others. To trust someone without knowing whether or not they are actually trust-worthy, as spiritual of an act as it might seem to hyper-religious people (like I used to be), is not something that seems healthy to do in my understanding of personal health and relational communities. 
    It's not that I "dis-trust" people for whom I have no track record though. Dis-trust is for people that have shown them self to be untrust-worthy. For people that I do not know yet, I simply trust them to the extent to which I trust anyone without a track record in my life....from a distance, and with all eyes wide open and willing to participate with them in life and learn and grow together with them to the extent that they are open to it with me as well, and in time, as we go down that path, I will choose to either trust or dis-trust them to the extent that they show them self to be trust-worthy or not.

Q: "It still seems to me that the promise of marriage that we make to each other seems to require a large step of faith (trust and hope) doesn’t it?"

A: Again, I do not have any faith to speak of. No, our marriage is not based on faith, but on a choice to love. There are no guarantees. It is always our individual choice each and every day whether or not to love the other. It's not about feelings either. If it were about feelings, certainly our marriage would have gone the way most of the others go a long time ago....either separated, divorced or still living together, pretending that everything's ok. It is specifically because of understanding this that we have not gone any of those ways. We would never claim to have the best marriage on the planet according to anyone else's standards, but we certainly do recognize our uniqueness and it is clear to us that very few other people on Earth have as high of a quality of relationship as we have. I know that every day when I wake up, when she says, "I love you", that it is for real and that she actually means it because we both decided long ago not to say things we don't mean and we continue to check in with each other about this and other things on a regular basis. We're not just skipping along, waiting for the next disaster to happen. We actually decided to be proactive in our relationship with each other, to seek to learn more about our selves and each other and about relationships and to seek help from whomever will give it.
    We do not always "get along" but this is because we are open, honest and real. We are different people and we will not always see things eye to eye. Since we choose to value our selves, each other and all others as persons (regardless of performance), we are able to deal with problems along the way and work on them together without running from them (well, at least without running for ever), and we are able to celebrate the healthy and enjoyable things and share them with others and invite others to walk a path of love and compassion for self and others in an environment of critical thinking without getting puffed up with pride.
    Yes, we encounter storms, but we get through them. Yes, we experience the full range of emotions and thoughts just like everybody else, and we get through it. Even though we're not religious anymore, we learned something from a religious leader in Minnesota named David Johnson, "The way out is through". Since there are no guarantees, and since the future is open, and since the nature and quality of our relationship is up to us, we're choosing to go through together. Will we always? We'll see. Neither of us has any intents on leaving this joint journey. Imagine that. All of this, but no faith. I'm just simply open, honest and real. One thing for sure, what you get from me is no bag of tricks or fancy philosophy or religious mumbo-jumbo that you have to wade through. You just get me.
  (Entry created in mid-June of 2003, but not added until 20030715_1056)

[NOTE: As ironic as it may seem to some of you, on July 15th 2003, I added my thoughts about my partner, Karen and the relationship we have together to this "about me" section of my site. Though I just added this portion to this section on the 15 of July, it was actually finished and ready to be placed here a while before this. I had actually been working on it throughout May and June of this year (2003). I only state that fact to let those of you whom might be curious know that this is the unedited version of what I had prepared for this section prior to Sunday, June 29th, 2003 so that you might have a more clear idea of why I'm perhaps not being quite as level-headed and compassionate in my present circumstances as you'd think I should be or as I'd honestly and genuinely like to be. This is my message to the world about my part in this relationship I have with Karen, and for now, I'm sticking by it. That's why I decided to put it up here without any changes that might reflect my current feelings about our relationship.] 

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