My mother was disgusted. “How can he exploit a young girl like that?" she exclaimed as she passed the newspaper. The headline read: "82-Year-Old Millionaire to Wed 22-Year-Old Model." It was accompanied by a photo. He looked to be about the same age as the Mississippi River, and she looked like a cheerleader in high school – the one who thought Mississippi was the wife of Mister Sippy.
I read the full story. Turns out he was an oil baron who saw her image in a magazine and was struck by her resemblance to a girl he’d lusted after in high school – the one with whom he could never get to first base.
Now he could afford to slide into home plate with a reasonable facsimile. So, he hired a private detective to track her down, wined and dined her at his mansion, and asked her to marry him.
She was from an economically devastated town in the Midwest where half the people were either pregnant or on drugs (or both), and the other half were in jail. She saw an opportunity to escape this grinding poverty by playing the role of spouse to an octogenarian who would likely spoil her like a grandpa for a few years, and conveniently expire before her 30th birthday – leaving her set for life.
"Seems like an effective survival strategy to me," I said to my mother.
"That can’t be real love"; she continued, "They are just into it for what they can get."
"I’ll bet this marriage is more likely than most to last 'till death us do part," I responded. "Maybe age plus beauty equals success."
"True love is a sacred emotion," she said; "It’s not a physics equation."
Her statement got me thinking about the nature of love. What is it exactly? I hit the psychology section at the local library to investigate the answer. My mother was right; psychology is not physics. Newtonian physicists all agree on the same precepts – the laws of gravity for example. But each psychologist seemed to have a different definition for love. This avenue of investigation looked to be a dead end until I came across a theorem by Julian Braebourne:
"People love each other to the degree to which they meet each other’s needs."
This statement perfectly explained the headline marriage. The 82-year-old man needed some arm candy and the young girl needed a means of escaping poverty. They married because they were able to meet each other’s needs.
Isn’t that the reason all people engage in relationships, I wondered, whether it be marriage, business, or friendships?
"Conversely," Braebourne wrote, "people cease to love one another to the degree to which they fail to meet each other’s needs.”
I applied this concept to our relatives. Some of them were no longer welcome in our home – so much for family bonds. I applied it to our friends. It didn’t take long to figure out what needs were being ignored in the troubled relationships. It occurred to me that the rocketing divorce rate could be ameliorated if people simply made more of an effort to meet each other’s needs.
Braebourne presented a corollary which read:
"Psychological bonds are created only when parties mutually meet each other’s social, emotional, or physical needs (singly, or in combination)."
This was a revelation to me. I’d never had any friends due to my crippling insecurities. My father was a character assassin who never missed an opportunity to take a shot at my self-esteem. Because he treated my siblings much differently, I’d come to believe that there must be some congenital flaws in my character, so I didn’t even try to make friends. (I learned decades later that he was not my biological father.).
Braebourne’s corollary gave me hope. Perhaps I could make friends simply by identifying and meeting needs, despite my congenital flaws. I pondered all night on the subject.
The next day, I didn’t sit by myself in the school cafeteria, I joined the "loser’s table" because they were the only ones who wouldn’t challenge my presence. One guy talked about his mini-bike problems; another just sat there looking down at his food. A girl lamented losing her sister to disease; another one talked about her love of baking.
I offered to help the guy with the mini-bike and the following Saturday afternoon, rebuilt his carburetor and struck up relationships with his brothers. I learned that the low-self-esteem guy also had an abusive father and we bonded by sharing our challenges. I attended the sister’s funeral where I met her family; her brother and I became friends. At my request, the baker started bringing her cookies to school and shared them with the other students at lunch. As a result, she made new friends and as a token of appreciation, brought me a "special bag" every Monday morning.
When it became obvious that people valued my engagement with them, my self-esteem soared. This belied everything the character assassin had taught me. It was a mind-bending period of change and growth.
I carried on in college. The first thing I did for the people in my milieu was to figure out what they needed and invest in their welfare. Often that involved little more than respecting and sympathizing with their woes.
My psych prof lamented the fact that he had to move to a different apartment, so I borrowed a truck and helped him. As one of the few students who owned a car at the time, I volunteered to chauffeur fellow students with me to concerts, shopping malls, or specialty stores in which I was interested. They often bought me lunch – me, one of the least popular kids in public school!
I had the best audio system in the grad apartment complex – an Empire 395 turntable, Marantz receiver, and large Wharfedale speakers with sand-filled enclosure walls. I invited those who showed an interest in music over to my place for Saturday listening sessions. Soon, the regulars included my psych prof and the school’s registrar. The crowd got so large, I broke it into smaller groups and cycled them according to their musical and pharmaceutical tastes (it was the Sixties). I became popular simply by meeting needs, despite my congenital personality flaws!
Not all people responded well. Some were suspicious of my motives. This bothered me so I mentioned it to my psych prof. "They crucified Christ and he was presumed to be perfect, Jan, so what chance do you have to please everyone? Don’t throw your pearls to swine."
Others took advantage of my magnanimity. I spent several days restoring a motorcycle to operating condition and never heard from the guy again. I had to learn to spit out the pits in order to enjoy the cherries.
After college, I landed my biggest accounts for International Paper Corporation using the same method. When I heard that the supervisor of an art department at a local college was unhappy with his reduced budget, I located a couple of abandoned pallets of mixed media in one of our warehouses on the East Coast. Then I offered them to him for pennies on the dollar. After that, the college ordered all their supplies from me.
In the cafeteria of a hospital account, I overheard a nurse lamenting that she just couldn’t afford a drum set for her young son. So, I contacted a musician buddy who happened to know of a used set and he arranged to get it to her. A few weeks later, her cousin called and asked me to drop over to talk about ordering supplies. That's how I landed the local distillery account.
By loitering in their head-office store, I learned that the CEO of a chain of auto supply stores had scored a deal on a used cabin cruiser, but he was distressed to discover that a new trailer was going to cost him almost as much as he'd paid for the boat. I spent all day on the phone (before the internet), found him a used one 1,400 miles away, and dropped in to tell him about it. He called the owner immediately and I had one of our trucks deliver it on a return run. He became my largest customer.
The challenge for me was not to "push product," as my boss urged, but to identify and meet needs. That resulted not only in new business, but also in new friendships.
When I saw an ad appealing for volunteers for the Big Brothers organization, I responded and a month later, made a commitment to the 8-year-old son of a divorced woman. For 10 years until he left for college, I took him on all sorts of adventures on my motorcycle.
I agreed to serve on the Big Brothers’ board of directors. In order to help finance the organization, I co-founded a local chapter of a service club called Optimist International, which grew very fast. That got me some media attention, which resulted in an offer to sit on the city council's Social Services Advisory Committee. Some of the members of the city council became friends and a year later, the city became my client. That wasn’t my intention; I just set out to help a kid in need.
When BMW stopped making simple air-cooled motorcycles in favor of heavier, more complicated ones, many owners felt abandoned (included me). I recognized the need for an airhead BMW club so I started one. It grew to be a national organization with over 3,000 members which hosted events in every state. The club was instrumental in forming many lifelong friendships. I enjoyed the events, camaraderie, and acclaim for over 31 years before finally hanging up my helmet.
20 Years ago, when the local audio club needed a new president, I volunteered. It’s a lot of work, but it resulted in another large circle of longstanding friends.
Despite a deep-seated lack of self-esteem which has never ceased to nag me, and my failure to internalize the lessons of Freud, Jung, Erikson, Frankl, etc., I lived a gratifying life simply by leveraging the principle of Karma: "What goes around comes around." By focusing on the needs of others, I satisfied my own.
Maybe that’s why it’s more blessed to give than to receive.
Courtesy of Clipart-library.com.
Header image courtesy of Pexels.com/Lamar Belina.
