Mercenary Love

(A Tale of Two Gals: from the experiences of the Ecce Homo)

So, let’s be diametrically clear: You always pay for love! Be it mercenary love or ordinary love, you always pay the price! In the first case, you consciously and deliberately pay in countable coin for the enjoyment of it. In the second case, you pay monetarily, emotionally, and in all kinds of imaginable currency for its enjoyment, its suffering, and even its most boring periods.

Just for the sake of the argument, let’s say you get in love with a Brazilian hotty, and let’s imagine that the name of this BZ hotty is Paula. You get in love with her because she is beautiful, and sexy, and tender, and spiritual, and she has a spark of intellectual curiosity somewhere deep in her brain, and she craves after excellency in all the departments of her life, and she wants to learn philosophy and German from you, and work out with you, and to be your Tantric shakti... All she wants is to bloom! —or so it seems. This is shop-window Paula.

So, because you feel she is all these things and she wants all those things, and —further— because you want to be seen as a generous man who takes good care of his girl, you buy her lunch, and you buy her dinner, and you buy her breakfast, and you buy her gifts any other week, and you pay for the taxis you take together, and for the movies, coffees, and all sort of activities you enjoy together, and you even make her a substantial loan to refloat her ill-managed sinking business. And Paula, at first, is always exultant to see you. And three months later (starting from the first kiss), there is always a complaint: she is tired, she is burned out, she has a broken leg (metaphorically speaking, I guess, unless she has more unseeable legs beyond her presumed bipedalism); temperature and noise are never right, food is never good enough, you are never well enough dressed; she gets so bored when you talk philosophy... German is way beyond her BZ ken... her only known excellency shows itself in her whimpering... And, by the way, none of her so-called friends escapes her verbal scathing, behind their backs, of course; so, you can imagine what she says about you when you cannot hear her.

And six months later (starting from the first kiss), all the blooming you get to see is that of her demands : she needs more time with you, she needs more of you, she always needs some more money —to get her eyelashes trimmed, to meet the end of the month, to buy a plane ticket to Brazil, to purchase something chic, a handbag, a pice of jewlery, a blouse. And when you begin to say no, she begins to deny you even her smile. And in the meantime, she is getting fatter, but because you point out this undesirable, yes, unbecoming change in her formerly lean, athletic body, you are a male chauvinist, and a colonialist, and a patriarchist, and whatever new neologism she has recently learned in her one and only mind-feeding-ground —YouTube. And then the lies begin  —lies about her feelings, her doings, her expectations. So, you finally have met back-room Paula.

Now, just for the sake of continuing with the argument, let’s say you regularly visit a place where you can meet a girl for an hour or two for a specific price, and let’s imagine the girl you meet is an Argentinian beauty who goes by the artistic name of Dara. 

Just to give you a hint of what it is to be with Dara, imagine that the sexiest Hollywood star came out of the screen to spend a time with you, just with you, to fulfill your wildest dreams... So, every time you go to see Dara, she is happy to see you, to be with you, to take a shower with you, to lie with you... or, if not, she fakes it so perfectly well that real reality cannot match this paid-for reality. Dara is always cheerful, enjoys her work, never complains, calls you “my love”, praises you —you’ll never hear a mild nor (much less) a wild demand from her. You trust her, and she trusts you. You melt under her touch, and she flowers under yours. The time you spend with her flows fast, but she imprints her face and heart so deep into your skin that you are never really without her anymore.

And then, at the end of the month you inspect your accounts and you realize that, alltogether, your mercenary love is costing you a tenth of a tenth of what you spend feeding your voraciously greedy non-mercenary love. Even more, Dara is not draining you emotionally, nor boring you like all those times when your fucking Paula has you waiting while she dries her hair, gets dressed, or fights (i.e., makes you fight) her inexhaustible dramas. So, in the end, which one is the actual mercenary love and which one is the extraordinary love? Do you think there’s really a possible choice here?