Love or Survival

Not long after we, humans, are born we begin noticing that we had better learn to negotiate our way around in this world if we are not going to end up battered, bruised and painfully damaged.
 Human babies are simply not smart. Every bit of smartness is going to have to be picked up through hard knocks, or from those around who have been through hard knocks themselves.
 Very early in life, human emotions begin to either push us or pull us, beginning with emotions centered around life with the immediate family. As we becomes older our emotional circle broadens, and pretty soon begins to draw us toward persons of the opposite sex ( for the straight). We  fall in love, and once that happens everything else is shot to hell.
 Unfortunately, in this kind of world it is quite possibly to fall in love with someone who could destroy us. It is possible to love someone who is bad for us, and therein lies the problem.
It is a problem because  love that is without anything else to temper its irrational, empty-headed behavioral tendencies and compulsions, could be a dangerous and destructive thing.
 It is not helpful to be in love with someone who does not want anything out of life. To be in love with someone who is satisfied with very little, or nothing at all, will keep us having very  little because, unfortunately, such a person takes without giving, and subtracts without adding much more than a good feeling.
 We know that in this kind of world, this thing called the human need for survival, could not care less for anybody's emotional feelings about anybody else. Bills have to be paid, children have to be fed, homes have to be supplied, and the cost of food and other necessities doesn't stop rising simply because our heart is warmed when the person we love comes around. Life rumbles on like a merciless train, and it cares nothing about how melted like ice cream on a hot summer day our heart is feeling.
In the 1940s,1950s, and even up to the 1960s, when a young man said he loved a young woman, he had to write a letter to the girl's father. The father would set up a meeting with the young man. When the time came, the father, the young man and the girl's mother sat in the drawing room, or perhaps at the dinner table, after church, over some stewed yard fowl, rice,pigeon peas and lemonade.
 The first question the father asked was "What is your intention toward my daughter?" One of the words the young man was expected to mention in his answer was "married", and he had to be able to tell the father how he was going to take care of the young lady.
 Today it is different.
 Marriage is absolutely out of the equation today, and the young man need have neither job nor ambition. All they both need, they think, is sweet love, until life begins to show them that it does not care two hoots about who loves whom when the child cries loudly in the middle of the night, and he expects her to be the one to get up, because, after all, she is the one with the breast.
 After a couple of occasions like this she begins to wonder "What the hell did I do? Why did I entangle my life with this tall, once handsome idiot?" and he begins to wonder "Why did I entangled myself with this.... nag?" because  the presence of love and the absence of a sense of responsibility have ways of making love taste like rotten cheese.