Every relationship is, to some extent, an exercise in futility.

Comrade X has turned his attention away from the horrid oppressive world of capitalist oppression and commodification and alienation to another world of oppression, commodification, and alienation -- the world of human relationships. Specifically, the world of romantic relationships. There are five salient points we must always observe when beginning to embark on such relationships, or even in the midst of the blinding whirlwind of confusion and deflection such relationships consist of:

1. Everyone, absolutely EVERYONE, brings their rotting, stinking garbage to a relationship. No matter how hard you try, there is no waste disposal service willing to touch the toxic debris sitting in those precious cans we keep under our sink, we unwilling to let them go, unwilling to unburden ourselves from them (and isn't it strange that we keep garbage in our very homes, under the sink in which we wash our food? The metaphor is not lost on me. We live with our garbage all the time, emptying it occasionally only to fill our receptacles with even more garbage, some similar, some the same, some dissimilar, but all, all still garbage).

2. Everyone lies. To themselves, to their "loved ones," to the IRS, to EVERYONE. The world is based on lies. If it were based on truth, we'd all be dead in seconds.

3. "Happiness" is merely a reprieve from the depression that relationships cause (and are). No one is happy all the time. No one is happy most of the time. All are unhappy all the time, and when they're not, it's only because their partner isn't fucking pulling some insane childish hamfisted headgame on them, and so they can fool themselves for a bit into thinking that the world, their relationship, is a happy place. You know this is true, though you don't want to believe it.

4. People are, generally speaking, craven and weak. Relationships, then, based as they are on people (by definition), are craven and weak, too.

5. Sex is not a palliative for emotional abuse, despite what you think.

Yes, these five points are salient, and in this world of pain and misery and alienation, Comrade X pities us all, for he knows that there is nothing, nothing we can do to change this. The only possible hope for something in the least bit positive between two people, and only on that infinitisimally small scale, is the impossible strength needed to leap into honesty, strength that must be held by each partner, not borrowed or shared from one to another, but held by each. Otherwise, you're doomed.

That's why god created masturbation.