Pathos as a necessity is weird: there’s nothing obviously attributable in our humanity which makes us hungry for empathy or sensitivity in the same way as, say, people are prone to falling in love and so we hunger for stories about love. Pathos appear to be very much ephemera - however inextricably bound up as Love is – in that most of the time you could replace them with some other sources; you wouldn’t have the same titillation, but the protagonists' conflicts and permutations could still remain in place. Indeed, it’s not unheard of for it to be inserted as plot devices.
But there are far more legitimate queries about the idea of Dating being qualitative in our humanity. This evening I was spell-bounded by Luigi's remarkable tales of baiting the female sex for companionship, and I might go out on a limb to suggest Darwinist tradition, fitness selection and pride; if it is, it's rooted much deeper in our evolutions. Love is at least as arbitrary as pastoral: there’s no pressing need to have stories about shepherds in an idealized countryside, but for some reason we developed a televised culture of such idealism. Though of course if you have a society where only rich, landowning people elope in the name of Love you may get pastoral perfectionism, and if you have a society which fetishises Love you may get Dating - now we’re slipping towards the conflict between determination by social forces and individual action.
I suppose I have to mention the distinction between Love and Dating. It’s useful sometimes when, say, you’re going out with a desirable mate around a clique selected from a very broad base of interactions and, though it’s often attacked for being as arbitrary as Love itself, it describes some very real differences in approach. But it’s not an airtight distinction. Still, I’m going to try to grasp the unequal relationship between the two, disregarding their fuzzy boundary. Let us revisit the setting that Luigi's companionship was born from. I'm sure you were there when he related: he cajoled, she didn't prevail against his palm advances, and our hero gets the damsel.
I’d hesitate to accuse him of describing necessarily simple which would be shooting myself in the foot while I'm not even yet a nascent powerhouse but I don’t doubt that it can seem formulaic and empty when talk is cheap. Anyhow, imagine YK in that scenario. But there’s no need to restrict ourselves to him here. What I like about Luigi's recounts are what we possibly can attain, and it’s also what we can’t – and perhaps want to – escape from: armor-plated isolationism. JY has proved pretty resilient in the face of the apathy which is supposed to mark this new so-called Herbivorous-Male age. And, as fun as it is to look at the old through the new, sometimes it’s just as much fun to look at the new through the old; now it’s true that nearly everything plays with the idea of flirtation to a greater or lesser extent – but to do that you need the concept in the first place.
Flirtatiousness resurrects personal combat for a certain evolution-ised setting. It is like playing a five-men Big Two: it permits you to keep the best and heap the rest on the shoulders of unluckier players with lousier decks. Better still, if an attachment is involved, which means that to the observer, very little separates the start till the sex – a situation so stereotypical that it’s almost never played full out in normal television shows. Companionship is a niche for the glib and honed which, while not necessarily bad or good, is not my cup of tea. And the origin of this post is an excuse for adding some speculative into the mix – Dating, yes, but compensated dating, Edison?