All pining really does is leave you still feeling miserable for years, while the person you pine for moves through other women like a pothead with a bag of Doritos. All pain and no reward. Don’t even bother!

Hmm, as someone who’s done her share of pining, I’ll weigh in that pining, in and of itself, is unproductive. However, there is energy that you can do with that pining. For instance, I was pining over this one guy once and I needed to be held and touched but he wasn’t around. So, I learned to dance tango. If you know anything about tango (and if you speak Spanish and understand the lyrics), a big part of the music and the dance is about longing. So given that I was already in that state, I could access that energy and pick up tango fairly quickly and competently. I also got my need for touching met since Argentine tango is often danced in close embrace. So that was a great relief but it wasn’t just straight up pining, lying in my bed at night, thinking of this guy.

The other way that I was able to use that pining (same guy, btw) was that I decided, Well, the guy isn’t here and I wish he were, so I’m going to write a story based on him and me and in that story the fictional me will be able to hang out and make love to him. The characters were real (at first bc later on when you write fiction, characters take over and become their own entities) but the situations were entirely imaginary. They were all about wish fulfilment. Now, the funny thing is that when people read thsi story, they totally thought it was 100% autobiographical. That was very odd to me.

So that’s how pining can become productive. But you have to act on it. NOw, whether or not I was such a great dancer or the story was that terrifically well-written, I would say, no. Bc in order to create lasting works of art, you have to refine, refine, refine and that involves hard work and lots of effort.

See, the pining itself isn’t productive but what stems from it very well may be. The writing, dancing, etc. whatever you use to cope isn’t actually pining! It’s what you’re doing instead of pining. I don’t know if people see that difference, or if I just think of it that way.

That being said, I’ve been a big piner in the past and it has led me down a bad road. There is nothing worthwhile in it at all. Knowing that won’t necessarily stop me from doing it, but at least I’m aware of it.

Casssi also said: “i am so tired of learning from experience. i get an f every time.”

And I love this. Exactly. Me too. And no one can tell me anything, I have to live it first, then I believe. All that self-pity, wasted….

On pining, it’s pushed me into lots of good creative places–but most of the creative/productive pining comes from pining for Northern California and Dillon beach. The pining I did over men– all the bloody years of it– is OVER now and it didn’t produce much more than very bad poetry. The anger, well the anger over lost relationships and love helped me write good stuff, healing stuff, getting CLEAR stuff. Perhaps Angry Pining works?

And now my pining days are over…and the Giant Bunny Rabbit of Intolerance is trying to replace it. Every other thought: “Well fuck that”. Yet I suppose it’s all a process….

Are you the famous Scott Elsa writes so much about?

Marly - Yeah that’s Scott. He told me I could out him.

Laughing at/with Sylvia re: this part of her comment:

“And now my pining days are over…and the Giant Bunny Rabbit of Intolerance is trying to replace it. Every other thought: “Well fuck that”.”

Yup. I’m there too. And I know it’s a place I can’t stay.

It’s the pendulum thing: first one extreme (you put up with too much), then the other extreme (you put up with NOTHING!!!), eventually, the happy middle.

I wrote ‘Sometimes’ although I don’t think pining per se is productive really. I worked with a great many kids with depression and self-harm who were under the illusion that their inner pain was needed to bring some great work of Art and Profound Shit forward. But what it wound up as 90% of those people just hurting and occasionally breaking out into bouts of crappy melodramatic poetry. More often than not, the whole ‘but pining leads to creative greatness’ sounds to me like people in denial about having wasted a whole chunk of their life out of which nothing arose.

I don’t think pain makes people great. I think sometimes it jolts the seed of greatness that was already within people because it grows to become an outlet and a coping mechanism.

Pining was generally correlated with a productive time for me - coming as it did at the beginning and end of periods of depression. During the depression nothing could get done, but the pining bits were times of frenzied productivity because I was in pain but not emotionally frozen and my creativity became an outlet for all my rage and grief.

However, I don’t think pining caused me to be creative. I think it would have done sod all if I wasn’t a creative person anyway, and creativity grew because it became a coping mechanism to ease the longing and the pain.

As another Venus-Neptune-Pluto I’ve pined an awful lot throughout my life, but none of it was a day longer than I needed it to. I’m not a wallow-in-self-pity-and-woe type of person, but with some loss (like the death of my father when I was a child) it wasn’t something I could just move on from. I can trace an awful lot of my subsequent creativity to that loss, but I don’t think that I’d be creativeless without it - I think probably the creativity would have just poured itself into a new form. The stories and art I make now is very different to the art and stories of my depressed days - I don’t think it means we cannot produce anything but a)the stuff we produce will have different themes b) creativity doesn’t feel like such a life/death issue, so indeed production may well drop but c) quantity doesn’t amount to anything necessarily, and even if you’re producing volumes of stuff it might all be really shit.

Oh and I meant to add that my 2nd husband shared Van Gogh’s birthday. He was a little crazy too, but I loved him dearly.

Wow, those are some awesome comments! I especially liked Molly’s idea of a “purgatorial expiration date.” *chuckle* Most of you have already illuminated my thoughts on the whole thing, prolly better than I could.

I have never been a piner, it makes no sense to me. Like someone else said: whomever/whatever you’re pining about is doing just fine without you. Why waste the energy?

No. More. Pining. Boo! who can afford to be that indulgent? There, I said it. I think pining is indulgent. What else contains that lack of committment? You never have too change a thing. Delusions? ME?

Signed,
Neptune in the 12th (trined Venus, Mars, Saturn; sextile Pluto).
A reformed piner

“Van Gogh didn’t cut his ear off because of some bitch. He cut his ear off because he was crazy. She just happened to be his bitch at the time so she got the ear.”

Hilarious.. I love it hahaha

I agree with Ruth. Good for Art and Bad for Life!

no.
i do it often enough, but it doesn’t get me moving anywhere.
i think it’s a form of escapism- stay stuck in a lost daydream rather than paying attention to Right Now.

I don’t know about pining but I do prefer processing.

Neptune? Me? Nah.

I’d definitely like my 11.5 years of pining back. I have lots of things I’d like to do with that time. Pining is refusing to accept what is. If I pine over a lost relationship, I still have it, right? Because I recreate it every moment I’m pining.

Here’s a chilling thought. When I’m pining, is the other person pining for me? No. Who is he thinking about? Not me. He’s moved on in his life, probably with someone new. Maybe has forgotten me altogether. This cold water on the heart wakes me up fast. (Maybe gets me pissed, but that’s better than pining.)

Now, transmuting the feelings into something creative…that’s not pining, by my definition. Pining is energy-sapping and implosive.

Well I’ll pine if want to! To me the energy of the emotions HAVE to be burned through. I mean if someone knows how to turn off love for someone then please tell me.

Hey ‘PixieDust’ I’m a Pisces Moon too. It’s a b*tchin position for a Moon to be ;-( In the words of Elizabeth Gilbert (Cancerian so she understands), I’m a ‘cross between a Labrador and a limpet.’

I have shut myself away for a year at a time to ‘lick my wounds’ when a relationship has ended. What a waste! Seriously, they’ve moved on and you’re lighting candles on the altar of your failed relationship??? WTF.

Fortunately, we mature! In my 30’s, I’m learning to say “No way Pal, I’m not wasting a precious second of my time mourning you”. My heart may be sore but I’ll limp along for a while and keep it wide-open.

I’ll feel sad sometimes for things that didn’t work out how I wanted them, but not any longer than I can help it. I’ve got a life to live - and dreaming up or crying over what is not part of my life anymore isn’t how I want to use my energy. I’ll take an imperfect experience of reality over a perfect fantasy every time.

I’ve wasted time pining. But then I didn’t have the tools or knowledge of how to stop really. Now that I’m in my 30s it’s different and I’m working on acknowledging feelings, allowing them, moving through them and saying that’s enough it’s time to work towards the dream instead.
My relationship ended because i want children. I’m in a pine period which I’ll work through but I’m conscious of not wanting to stay in this state. I’d rather use the energy searching for my dream (to have children) and being disappointed if it’s not to be.. then being in that relationship (even though we were very compatible and i’ll miss him) and pining for children. I guess I miss the hope that it would happen with him.

yes, i agree, depends how you use it