Kanye West recently got me to thinking about the callous facade men and women take on when not satisfied with matters of the heart. Along the lines of Jay-Z’s “They say you can’t turn a bad girl good, but once a good girl’s gone bad, she’s gone forever,” Kanye’s song “Heartless” is an honest musing on the deterioration of an honest and burgeoning relationship gone awfully sour. A few days ago on Twitter, Peter Santilli made a poignant observation about the relationships between human beings:

Horniness brings people together. What the world needs now is a sexual revolution. Put your depression calculators away for a bit.

– Peter Santilli

While Peter might be a little more, say, curt than I am, I will say I agree in one respect: the essential “end” to all this “means” is sex, and not just sex, but an intimate and loving relationship with a significant other. Whether that manifests itself in marriage, children, or just a life-long partnership of mutual love, most of us biologically crave that intimacy and, in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways, WANT to be vulnerable and WANT to feel protected on some level.

Isn’t it always funny for instance when you hear that a person broke up with their significant other and the next day you’ll read in their status or their blog, “That’s it; from now on, I’m gonna be cold hearted.” only to find out that in a couple of months, they find themselves in another relationship? How about those dudes who have a plethora of women they have sex with / randomly make out with / play with but when you ask them on a one-to-one level, all they ever talk about is how they want to settle down and to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors? You’ll also note that those who we generally characterize as sensitivity have sharp reactions to touch or emotion.

And from that first meeting of someone to actually making that real contact, there’s an almost infinite combination matrix we have to follow to get to those “ends:” the lies, the fibs, the guessing, the presentation, the representation, the setting, the spontaneity, the nuances of what he / she does and says, the reminders and reminiscing, the bad / good breath, the questions about their habits like “Does this make him a bad / good lover?”, the walking slowly and holding hands, the sweaty palms and wondering if the other person feels the same way you do, the successes and failures of getting some the first time around and maybe not, and wondering whether you’ll ever see them again, the drunken phone calls / texts, the yearnings in the late night, the confusion about why the person didn’t call if “it was good”, the subsequent postings or writings in the personal journals, the conversations with their “people” about that person they met the night before, the departure of the representative and the arrival of the real person, the repeat of this very cycle, and the anticipation that maybe it’ll have some happy ending.

Yet, before all this, we have people who seem to walk around with no heartbeats, their sense of touch relegated to the umpteenth most important sense rather than in their top 10. Too many people are heartless …

Jose, who finds this the longest story ever told …