WHEN LOVE AND HATE COLLIDE

PART 1: The bad and the ugly

Do bear with me on this read! The ‘Good’ comes at the halfway point, but I do feel I have to address the unpleasantness first.

It could be me and my skewed view of history but if you were a person of some importance or respect and you suggested we ‘got along’ or even attempted to love one another you often ended up getting assassinated!

You maybe familiar with Mahatma Ghandi, John F. and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr and John Lennon, all preachers of love or peace meeting a fateful end.

However, when it comes to dictators, who murder thousands or millions of their own citizens, they somehow carried on to a ripe old age!! Stalin died of a stroke, Mao of Parkinson's, Amin of organ failure, Mugabe and Pinochet of old age in hospital and Pol Pot of heart failure. Hitler at least had the decency to top himself. No one thought to stop these guys?

Shockingly, or not, (depending on your world view) there were also 37 Mexican political candidates in 2024 running for local elections who were all assassinated. Something you wouldn’t have seen on the BBC for some reason, but nonetheless, it happened. I guess those already running Mexico are more than happy with the moniker of ‘killing capital of the world’. A stark warning to anyone with silly notions of trying to change the current situation!

Then of course there’s the most recent assassination attempt on another political candidate. Love him or hate him, Donald Trump!

If I mention any conspiracy regarding the shooter or the CIA security detail you’re probably going to switch off, so I’ll do my absolute best to avoid that. Instead we could simply wonder what drove the attempt on his life? What filled Thomas Matthew Crooks with so much hate that he felt he had to murder this candidate? Or was one of Trump’s promises to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine a bit out of favour with the military industrial complex? Bugger, I said I’d try!!

A peace offering

I’m sure I’m not the only person who is feeling and seeing rising levels of anger, division and hatred across our planet. Or is that the only view we’re able, or even allowed, to access through our current mainstream news and social channels?

Conversely, if I ditch the screen and move over to real face to face human interaction, there appears to be a completely different story. Just to take last week for instance. This included a visit to two network events, a cinema (Deadpool and Wolverine, just insane!!!) a restaurant in Frome (lovely), a shopping centre, a bus ride, a chemist, a hospital and my band rehearsal. I estimate I spoke with at least 40-50 people where the majority were complete strangers. Admittedly the bus driver could have been more responsive, but the conversation with a passenger regarding her zebra costume was fascinating. Different ages, different races, different accents and not once did I feel that anyone wanted to kill me.

The sad news

I am very aware of the recent tragedies in Southport and the ‘waves’ of violence across the UK and I’m not dismissing any of that in comparison to my seemingly tranquil week. Sadly though, it’s all too familiar. In my life time I’ve known riots in St Pauls (Bristol), Brixton, Handsworth, Bradford, London, Tottenham, even the Poll Tax riots (ask your parents). In my teen years, the IRA bombings in England were almost common place, and were of course predominantly politically motivated.?

Another sad fact of UK life, is the average of 70 child homicides per year with another 130 domestic child homicides due to abuse or neglect. Meaning they were perpetrated by a member of the family, the vast majority being the parents. These figures however have not suddenly or massively increased in relation to the growth of population over the last 50 years. Of course there have been more recent spikes with terrorist attacks, malevolent doctors and pandemics!?

With a hunger for 24 hour news coverage however, we are now aware of almost all of them. Whereas 50 years ago we were totally in the dark and therefore not as fearful. 200 child homicides a year is of course awful, but the future death toll of our children due to heart disease, diabetes and obesity will dwarf that figure. And for the first time ever, the current generation of children have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. Is that not more worrying?

It’s in the genes

Like it or not, we are, by our very nature, a murderous tribal species. We have been in the making for at least 300,000 years and maybe more. And some people think those evolved impulses can be turned off in a generation by labelling every male as ‘toxic’. It really isn’t all of us!?

It is widely accepted that 1% of the world’s population are psychopaths. On top of that we have another 1% showing symptoms of sociopathy and 0.5% - 1% with traits of narcissism. And get this, up to 4% of business leaders are recognised as psychopaths! Therefore, compared to the general population, your boss is 4 times more likely to be a psychopath! With that well understood statistic, should we be at all surprised that people in charge of a nation start murdering their own citizens??

The fact that someone thinks to themselves, “You know what, I reckon I should be in charge of a country”, should be the most obvious red flag that they shouldn’t!

We don’t want reluctant leaders pushed into the role either. A discussion on whether we actually need leaders at all should be left for another time. The word ‘anarchy’ is misunderstood, but I do know that if I didn’t have someone ruling over me, I wouldn’t suddenly start becoming violent, looting and killing. But that’s just me.

There are currently 56 global conflicts with a kill count of 10,000+ according to the ironically named ‘Global Peace Index’. It’s not just Russia, Ukraine and Syria! As an aside, some of these conflicts are civil wars, where quite rightly the citizens have had enough of the human rights abuses by the incumbent governments. It’s not all invasion of land mass by neighbouring tribes.

None of us would be here, casually scrolling our IG feeds, if it wasn’t for our ancestors bludgeoning, each other to death. Empires rise, countries are enslaved and killed then empires fall, in a never ending cycle. It’s been happening since the dawn of man, it’s nothing new.

It’s on the box

The saddest thing of all, is that death, murder, conflict and fear is practically the only things that are considered ‘newsworthy’. No one reports on how ‘lovely’ the world is. The amount of murder, police and serial killer based dramas on TV and Netflix is staggering. Is this unquenching thirst for killing, more evidence of our underlying genetic make-up??

This reminds me of watching a kitten gazing at a bird in our garden for the first time. With no training from its mother or ‘how to be a cat’ schooling from us, the kitten’s mouth starts twitching and salivating uncontrollably. A dormant genetic hankering for fresh meat awakens within the tiny brain of the kitten for the first time of viewing a common sparrow.?

It’s just there. And so it is with us…

but…

among many other things we also have the capacity for LOVE!

PART 2: The good

So, do you think you’ve found the ‘one’? Your soul mate? The absolute love of your life??

You may have already deduced from the previous part of this piece that I like dealing in stats and probabilities, so I’ll ask again.

Have you, out of a possible 4.1 billion people*, unimaginably found the ‘one’ person that you are meant to be with via these top three routes:

1. meeting them at university ?
2. an online date in the same town? or ?
3. at a social occasion with mutual friends?

*(I’ve suggested half the world’s population as at August 2024 if you’re attracted to your opposite sex. Of course if you’re attracted to all the various sexes available then you can bump that up to around 8.2 billion.)

I don’t want to dismiss the notion that there are ‘soul mates’ or ‘the ones’ out there for the romantics reading this. But think about it. Can most of them just happen to be a friend of a friend who happen to live relatively nearby??

The rarer opposite seems just as implausible. You’re fed up with the first 10 years of corporate life, so you decide to venture half way around the world on a backpacking trip through south-east Asia and unbelievably, you meet your ‘person’.

What are the odds?

Is it really 1 in 4 (or 8) billion?

I met my wife, Mandy, via the first scenario, at Uni (or ‘Poly’ as it was back in 1984). We were ‘friend’s for about a year and then officially ‘went out’ until 1996 when we got married and have been together ever since.?

A miracle?

Love’s young dream

It’s no secret between us, but I’m pretty sure I was ‘in love’ on 2 occasions before meeting Mandy! Shout out to Karen and Linda! Mandy had also mentioned ‘John’ and ‘Leo’ in her tally when we were comparing past flames!

Out of the 4.1 billion girls that I theoretically had the opportunity to ‘go out with’ and subsequently fall in love with, how is it I miraculously hit the jackpot 3 times. I hasten to add I did ‘go out’ with a few more, but I don’t recollect the ‘in love’ bit of the equation. From the age of 16, I can recall that I ‘went out’ with 9 girls (again, out of 4.1 billion), and as we know, I had the capacity to ‘love’ 3 of them. Whether the love was requited on each coupling is anyone’s guess. I’m pretty confident the last one is!!

Using that math, one could presume I was likely to fall in love with every third girl on this planet. It would then follow that I’d meet a reciprocating ‘soul mate’ with every 9th girl.?

The only unknown would be, was she ‘THE’ one or ‘A’ one? Or are they both the same thing?

You may shout me down for not being romantic at this point! My wife will confirm that I’m not, so that won’t bother me. What I’m trying to be, is incredibly optimistic about what we are capable of as a species and I’m trying to offer a different viewpoint to the journey of love.

My premise is that we have the capacity to ‘love’ more than we are led to believe. We are bombarded with messages and images of hatred, and at the same time we are fed an almost impossible romantic illusion that there is only one person in the world that is your true love or soul mate or person. So good luck!!

That most unlikely statistic can weigh heavily and I’m trying to suggest that it doesn’t have to.

In ‘reality’

What also triggered this outpouring of thought is glancing at the recent genre of ‘dating’ programmes. Namely ‘Love is Blind’, ‘’Perfect Match and ‘Marriage at first sight’. I’m not a huge fan of them, partly because of my background in film and video. My experience unfortunately lets me see past the mesmerising veil of production and editing. We’re sometimes shown an incredible ‘intimate moment’ between a couple and we’re not supposed to notice the 3 camera angles, 2 boom mics and the possible crew of at least 6 people behind the cameras!

We do know that ‘Marriage At First Sight-UK’ has psychiatrists, therapists and match making experts to nudge the process along. However, beyond the production, scripting and editing, with a possible overwhelming need to be on telly, there have been some successes. Random strangers from very close proximity to each other have found ‘the one’. With a quick bit of AI research, out of the 6 series from 2015-2022, there are 3 couples still married (at time of publication).

‘Love is blind’ is a slightly different beast with a bit of help from a matchmaking algorithm to give the contestants a bit of a chance to seek each other out. Just by talking, listening and sharing stories these young hopefuls not only ‘fall in love’ but happily propose quite quickly in the process without seeing each other. Bearing in mind it took me 10 years to pop the question!?

Are their actions simply in line with the production schedule and the fact that they have placed themselves in a situation that is expecting the proposals? Sub-consciously they may be taking on a role and following an imagined script of what is exactly expected of them? Maybe? I’m trying so hard not to ruin the romance as Mandy is addicted to these programmes.

Love is all around

With all my TV pessimism aside, I still take it as a sign that we can quite easily find ‘the one’ because everyone we meet has the potential and capacity to be ‘the one’. The median number of meaningful partners we have, before ‘settling down’ long term (in a non-arranged marriage culture) is 5 or 6 (from a range of 2-12). In a culture with arranged marriages that number is obviously a lot closer to zero.?

What’s more interesting, arranged marriages are the rule for the majority of the world (55%) and with that number, only 4% end in divorce as opposed to 40% of autonomous marriages. Sure, there are different attitudes, views and taboos regarding marriage and divorce outside the ‘west’, so it’s quite hard to deduce which route increases the chances of ‘forever happiness’.

It has crossed my mind while writing out these thoughts that I might be suggesting a perception of ‘settling’ or ‘making do’ and that really is not the case. To disprove my premise, you might think you would have to ‘go out with’ every single person in the world, just to make sure you’ve found the absolute perfect partner. If you don’t, how can you possibly exclaim you have found ‘the one’? Well clearly you can’t.

Universal love

My contention is that all of us are already connected. We’re already each other. We’re already soul mates. If we see that as a starting point every time we meet someone new and then find out we share a liking for Cheesecake and Crowded House, then that’s just an added bonus.?

As an organism we are incredibly complicated and I am of course attempting to fathom two of the most extremes of our essence. However I do believe there is a stark difference between the feelings of hate and love that we really should be reminded of.?

We’re not born with hate. We have to be taught to hate.?

Often we learn to hate without questioning our elders, friends, communities or tribes. People can certainly make you frustrated and angry. We can disagree and dislike other people's views of the world. But ramp that up to hate? I think that takes some outside influence.

Alternatively we don’t get taught to fall in love, it just comes over us in a surprising wave when we meet someone and there’s a ‘connection’. Of course we get taught respect, right and wrong, and other similar social niceties, but ‘love’ is already internal, just waiting to be experienced and shared.

I’m pretty sure this essay of nonsense won’t stop the tide of tyrannical leaders running the world and driving wedges between us all. They insist we take sides, then try to force us to choose; right or left, black or white, gay or straight, Jew or Muslim. But getting through life is actually a lot easier than that. No matter what the political, racial, sexual or religious make-up of the person in front of you is, you only have to ask one question…are the good or bad humans??

Psychopaths, Sociopaths and Narcissists aside, roughly 95% of the time, they’ll be O.K. and all of them have the potential to be ‘the one’.