Polygamist Dating Shows

Aside from the dose of Flavor of Love I could have done without, I tend to stay away from these types of shows. Firstly, I think it's unhealthy and unrealistic. Secondly, polygamy has never appealed to me. But anyway, that's not the primary point here. The primary issue is...my grandmother (by way of my little cousin) has gotten hooked on I Love New York, which is some kind of spin-off of Flavor of Love. I remember her from the first season of Flavor of Love...if you get dumped by Flava Flav...twice maybe you should take a step back and re-evaluate what you're bringing to the table. I mean, I'm just saying. Anyway, Granny tells me that New York has Harvard Law graduates and all kinds of business men on her show. You mean New York can get a Harvard Law man but I can't? The real issue is, if you're graduating from Harvard Law School, why are you trying to get with New York? So, my grandmother, who holds down the front pew at church every Wednesday night and sometimes twice on Sunday is hooked on this show where New York often kisses multiple men in one day, goes on multiple dates and even talks about how she wants to have sex with most of the men.

Just when I thought Granny had lost all of her scruples, and was about to revoke her Sunday School card, she drew the line. I walked into the living room last night and Granny was about to lose her dinner. My cousin was watching something on MTV. I figured it was a music video. So I sit down. They were watching THE epitome of a polygamist dating show...A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila....a bisexual polygamist dating show. Talk about greed. Men and women. That's where Granny drew the line. In my research on this topic, I read on wikipedia that Tila Tequila eliminated one of the women on her show because she seemed to have problems with monogamy...does monogamy exist in the world of "reality" dating? Isn't that an unfair judgment?

It got me to thinking about love in general and how hoodooed people seem when looking for love. One of my favorite metaphors comes from Plato's Symposium. Aristophanes says that in primal times all men were spherical and we all possessed four arms, four legs, two heads and two sets of genitalia. We rolled around the earth's surface. There were three sexes: all male, all female and the androgynous or the hermaphrodite. The spherical humans set up a plan to scale the heights of heaven to take down the gods. Some of the gods wanted to destroy the entire race of humans. But the didn't want to lose the offerings. So the solution was just to make the humans weaker by chopping them in half. And so ever since then, we've run around earth saying that we're searching for our other half because we're really trying to return to our original forms. In one metaphor, he describes homosexual and heterosexual erotic love.

Anyway, the bottom line is, I decided not to judge these people who participate in these shows because perhaps we're all hapless half-beings rolling around looking for love.