Ray Acosta

...is scheduled as the guest speaker for the 320th meeting of the Karl Hess Club, to convene on June 21, 2021.

Ray Acosta on "How to Keep a Relationship Alive."

I had an epiphany on how to keep a relationship going. It's easy to fall into and out of love. It is harder to remain in love over time. Talk to people who have been married a long time, and they tend to say it's all about communication, compromise, and work.

I find that an unsatisfactory answer. I think that love is the belief that you and your partner share a set of hopes and dreams. Once your hopes and dreams are no longer in alignment, love dies. So the secret to a long relationship is to continuously keep your hopes and dreams in alignment.

The problem is we meet a person who shares our hopes and dreams, and decides to become a couple. With no hard work on our part, we believe our hopes and dreams will always be in alignment in the future. However, over time, our hopes and dreams change. At best, our hopes and dreams come true, and then what?

I propose that we must do the hard work of communicating our hopes and dreams with our partner, and then doing the hard work of aligning those hopes and dreams. As libertarians, we must take responsibility for our hopes and dreams. Hopes and dreams do not come to us like a virus. We choose our hopes and dreams. So we can choose to modify those hopes and dreams.

It is not all hard work. The best sex is a celebration of the realization that our hopes and dreams are in alignment.

About Ray Acosta:

Ray Steve Acosta is an American of Mexican heritage, a telephone engineer, and a writer.

Born in San Diego (Feb 18, 1944) and raised in Los Angeles, Acosta graduated Downey High School in 1961. He earned an AA from Cerritos Junior College in 1963, and a BS in Mathematics at California State College, Los Angeles, in 1970. Between his college stays, he served two years in the U.S. Navy as an electronics technician.

Acosta began his career as an outside plant engineer for Pacific Telephone in Los Angeles. In 1979 he transferred to their HQ staff in San Francisco, where his engineering work focused on mechanized tools. In 1998 he moved to Dallas to work for GTE Internet Workings as a systems planner. He fully retired in 2001.

In 1991 Acosta became interested in Mexican history, especially its revolutionary era (1910 to 1920), reading over a dozen books on the subject. In 2002 he joined an online group of amateur historians interested in the revolution, where he attracted the attention of Richard Grabman of Editorial Mazatlán. Grabman asked Acosta to write a chronology of the revolution, which resulted in Acosta's first book, Revolutionary Days: A Chronology of the Mexican Revolution (2010).

Acosta currently lives in Whittier.