In Love with a Child

We expect and demand of love eternal loyalty to one person, a binding social contract, something so definite, absolute, and flimsy, it's a wonder how anyone is successful at upholding its universal ideal. One man is supposed to devote all his love to one woman every day of his life, and she him, and their legal and social bond is supposed to even outlast time itself once the oath is given in marriage. Yet it can and is so easily all torn asunder the moment either one spreads their love to those outside the dyad. We only expect love to be shared among the human race in pairs, it seems, with eternal bonds of matrimony, and then forget to share the common two-minute kindness needed from us by everyone, every day, which requires no binding legal contract to make it legitimate. We trade real love for showy love.

This is to say that the western world upholds on the most high the hardest and most impossible form of love to maintain, and systematically ignores at best and abhors at worst its simplest and most common expressions. Grand spectacles of symbolic matrimony are performed at great cost to announce a man and woman's love for one another, no matter how genuine it is, but the one simple act of kindness on the street toward one's fellow man, woman, or child, goes unnoticed. And sometimes, particularly when it is extended toward children, it may even be fundamentally shamed.

What civilization loves instead is pomp and circumstance over genuine affection, costly displays of idealized romance over genuine devotion, and contractual obligation over personal loyalty. What civilization loves is the essence of the thing called love, all the fairy tale parts, without having the stomach for the whole fruit. If genuine love was the thing being valued in all this ceremony, then we wouldn't need to limit its expression to pairs of one man and one woman. If true love was the thing being valued, all genuine expressions of it shared between human beings would be celebrated equally. It wouldn't matter if the target of one's affections are men, women, boys, or girls. It wouldn't be so controversial for a man to admit to being in love with another man, or with a child, any more than it currently is if he is in love with a woman.

The question of sexuality in regards to the appropriateness of one's love interests is moot. Sexuality is a biological and social assignment, but even if was a choice, it would still be moot. Sex and love are two, often mutually exclusive, things--there can exist sex without love and love without sex, as John Lennon put it. If the object of your affections is a male human, and you're a male human, there is no reason why you can not be heterosexual at the same time. Likewise, if the object of your affections is a child, and you are an adult, there is no reason why you can not be a teleiophile, and be sexually attracted to other adults. The same formulations can be made for any combination of sexuality and love interest, so long as the affections are genuine. There is no reason then to assume that one's sexuality is determined by the characteristics of whom one chooses to love. Sometimes it is the case, but not all the time.

The act of being in love with a child is given such a negative connotation though in spite of this--even just expressing kindness and affection toward children will bring the word "pedophile" down upon you--as if expressing kindness and affection are to be reserved strictly for adults because children are unworthy of these niceties. Children are not deemed worthy of an adult's love, unless it is also bestowed with such honorific titles of circumstance like "mother's love" and (to a lesser extent these post-feminist days) "father's love." All others who may express or feel genuine love are treated to a private property sign or even mistakenly thought to be pedophiles. This is an arbitrary fence.

Kindness may be ignored and shamed among adults, and romantic love given such high and lofty worship, but the exact opposite is true for what is expected of children. In the same way that adult friends are to withhold their love for the child, so too is the child expected to withhold love for their benevolent friends, mentors, and non-parent associations. Children are taught that they may only express love in the form of deference to some official authority, unless that authority encourages otherwise, and this is more or less seen as a kindness. They are not even expected to express genuine love for anyone of any age for which there is not some biological necessity being fulfilled, but only platitudes of kindness--only what is expected from those "pure, perfect, angelic, little darlings." Adults view the close in age love relationship between two children or teens as they do the adult/child relationship--as threatening to the more hallowed "mother's love" or "father's love," and so they work to suppress it should it blossom beyond a mere crush.

It is true though that what we expect from children is different from love or affection, simply because kindness has its differences from love. Kindness describes a momentary act that is done for someone else's benefit, and this we teach children to strive for. Love describes an on-going appreciation of someone else's existence, similar to being a fan, or a follower. It may or may not drive someone to be kind toward the target individual, and that uncertainty is unbecoming of children. Just as sex and love are not always causally linked, love and kindness may not always be causally linked. As the old expression goes, "you only hurt the ones you love." Therefore, it is possible that the minute expression of love we expect from children and not from adults is indeed a purer form of love after all, as the nature of the romantic so-called "adult love" of celebrated matrimony often proves so fickle.

If that is the case, then why does the adult get the suspicious glare after the fact when he reciprocates a child's kindness? It is but an example of how love expression is indeed shackled to arbitrary social acceptability rather than genuine feeling. I suppose that's nothing we didn't already know.