Our Second Thoughts about love and art are, it strikes me, exactly reversed. We think art should be easy and effortless and flow through us and out into the world. But in fact it takes work and is hard. And we think that love, adult love, is hard and that relationships take work when, in fact, love is easy.
Two immediate notes: almost nobody will challenge me, I think, on the first thing. If art is easy, you're doing it wrong. It is especially of note now that we have thinking machines to make art for us if we want (which absolutely defeats the purpose. It is also, whether or not you can sell it, not art). I don't think anybody's going to @ me for saying this.
Lots of people are going to @ me saying the second thing (or they would if anybody read this, which nobody does). All the hypothetical @'ers they will all have incredibly valid points. I will say for starters that it's really difficult to love easily if you can't do it without ego, and it's really hard to do things without ego if your basic needs (in a Maslow's Hierarchical sense) aren't met. And it's not possible to love easily somebody who isn't willing to love you back. You know, like your teenager (well, not my teenager. But, I hear tell, other teenagers).
And it's probably really difficult to love if you are missing other elements of Maslow's Hierarchy, both above and below the "belonging" level (which I guess is where you'd put love? You'd also be perfectly right to put it with self-actualization). It is difficult to love if you are lacking food, or shelter. It is difficult to love if you are lacking esteem. Those are things that trigger ego responses, and an active ego makes love difficult.
This falls into a set of categories of my own belief that are, at best, problematic. Like, basically I'm saying you're not going to have true love if you're very poor. But maybe I'm just saying it's difficult, in the same way that it's difficult to have true love if you're very rich (though, obviously, for different reasons).
