Peter is a complete individualist in the way he chooses the girls he dates and in the way he relates to them once he gets to know them. Where Davy is glamourous and Micky is zany, Peter is thoughtful and natural, and these qualities are the basis of all his relationships.
“I mainly look for girls who think for themselves. This is the most important thing to me. I’ve found that once you’ve found a girl who thinks for herself, the other things like naturalness usually follow.
“I believe that anybody who takes an opinion somebody else has laid on them and says that it’s right, anybody who believes in something without checking it out thoroughly for themselves, has a serious flaw in personality. There’s no need to take anything on faith because anyone who does is depriving themselves. You can find God by the scientific method, all you have to do is do it.
Attractive girls Permalink
“I like attractive girls, of course, but attractiveness to me is naturalness. As little makeup as possible makes a natural girl and therefore a girl that’s attractive to me.
“I like different types of clothes on girls, depending on how they look on that particular person. I liked bell-bottomed slacks when they were around. A good pair of bell-bottomed slacks can look very nice on a girl if they’re well-tailored and the girl is well turned out. Essentially, though, I think clothes are a society-induced thing, especially in warm climates. I think people ought to loosen their clothes and be as close to nature as possible, while still being socially acceptable.
What love is Permalink
“Love is as love does. I love different people for their Godliness and their appeal to me as human beings. When I love somebody, I care for their fate, I’m concerned about their well-being, I have good wishes for their health, happiness and security and I hope they find God.
“It’s important to remember, though, that love is mutually felt. There’s no such thing as one person wanting another person more than that person wants him—that’s an infatuation, or it might be called a hang-up. If I love a person and all that person does is keep turning her face away from me, again and again, all it proves is that I’m interested in having that person turn their face away from me. I’m interested in not getting what I want.
“I believe that everybody always gets exactly what they want all of the time. That’s why I believe that when somebody is constantly getting kicked in the face by someone they are supposed to be in love with, all it proves is that they’re more interested in getting kicked in the face than in being in love. They’re just hung-up.
“Possessiveness and jealousy are not part of love, either. Once I had a long and very happy relationship with a girl who was everything that I wanted: she had a very strong personality that was all her own and she was very natural. After a while she started giving me very strange looks when I’d check-out another pretty girl. Finally I began to dig that she was getting upset. The more upset she got, the more distant I got until one day, when she gave me some verbal notice that she didn’t like what I was doing. I said, ‘Excuse me, I’ll talk to you later,’ to her, and I haven’t seen her since.
“I haven’t had a regular date in so long I simply can’t remember the last one. When I’m ‘dating’ a girl, we go up to my house and watch TV and eat dinner and sometimes we talk and sometimes we sit there and don’t say anything at all to each other. Nothing else. This is a true relationship to me, because we’re entirely natural with each other. When I feel like talking, I talk. When I don’t, I don’t. It’s the same with the girl I’m with.
“When a relationship is going well then I’m happy. When it’s going poorly then I brood and sometimes I’m rude. I don’t work as well if a relationship is going poorly.
Grooving together Permalink
“When I speak of a relationship it doesn’t mean that there’s just one. I relate to different people in different ways and I’ve often got many relationships going very groovily all at the same time. Often I’ll have several different girls up and we’ll all eat dinner, watch TV, talk—groove together. There aren’t any jealousy hang-ups and it’s beautiful.
“Most of the girls that do come up to my place are the ones who, in school, stayed home instead of dating a lot. I’m not usually interested in the ‘most popular’ sort of girl. It’s the ones who stayed home and read and thought a lot. They’re the ones I’m interested in because now, after they’ve had a chance to really think about what they’ve read and what they’re doing, they’re the girls worth really knowing.”
Peter obviously thinks a lot about the girls he goes with, and it seems that the girls who are lucky enough to have relationships with him are very lucky, for they will find that their relationships are truly valuable. Peter is the sort of person a girl can really love.
