A Contemplation on Love (Part One)
What is love? What does it mean to love and to be loved by someone else?
How do you define love in a relationship? What are you crave in it? What are your expectations?
Does readiness to fall in love equal falling out of love? Does that also equal being ready to get hurt and hurt the other, both intentionally and unintentionally?
I’ve been thinking about this one thing called love lately — a contemplation I actually rarely had. I even bought a book titled “Conversation on Love” by Natasha Lunn, trying my best to find the rightest among all the right answers to my contemplation — though I skipped some of the chapters to jump into this one chapter titled “How Do We Survive Losing Love?” because I feel like I need to read it first.
I — who normally search for a house inspo on Pinterest — even starting to search about anything related to relationships, which is weird but I never had the idea other people’s pins and boards could be super wise. I listen to love songs even more, both the happy ones, sad ones, or the kind of songs that state gratefulness for the partners and the relationship they had.
“Have I turned into a hopeless romantic? Is this normal? This kinda feels not like the usual me, but I think it’s alright. I’m trying to figure it all out” is the encouragement I gave myself every time I freeze while doing the ‘research’.
Speaking of love is speaking about your hopes and desires, your expectations and dreams, for yourself, your partner, and the relationship between the two of you. Speaking of love is speaking about intimacy. Speaking of love is speaking about sacrifices. Speaking of love is speaking about boundaries and respect, flaws and tolerance, and… there are just too many things correlated to when we speak about love.
In fact, when we speak about love, we also speak about the friendship between the two. This one is clear. To love someone is to befriend them. To befriend someone means you have that connection built through conversations. I don’t think couples need to have all those similarities or things in common with each other, as long you both enjoy the conversations. But to have enjoyable conversations also requires many things: openness, assertiveness, active listening, the ability to respond to the conversation nicely and with respect, and the curiosity to learn about each other — not just the person as themselves with their traits, but also to learn about their world. Later in the romantic relationship, your partner becomes the first person you would like to tell about anything, so the ability to have and sustain conversations is important. Therefore I can say friendship is the basis.
What differs befriending process between romantic relationships and an ordinary friendship relies on the expectations. It’s obvious that you have more expectations toward your partner — of how you want to be treated and taken care of, of the conversations, of the relationship, and also of the goals that you would like to achieve both as individuals and as a partner. Both surely have hopes for the relationship too — to last for long, to reach marriage, or even for eternity. Only by meeting each other’s hopes and expectations a relationship can survive. To consider: your partners and your hopes and expectations can be changed and developed through time. Of course, the third year of dating is different from the first year. You both grow and change along with time individually and as a partner, you know each other better, and so do the hopes and expectations.
Speaking of love is speaking of intimacy. What many people often being misled about is that intimacy always in the form of physical ones, such as through make-outs, while in fact, it’s just one of the kind of intimacies among the other kinds. There are five kinds of intimacy: Physical Intimacy, Emotional Intimacy, Intellectual Intimacy, Spiritual Intimacy, and Social Intimacy. For some people, love can develop through physical intimacy, but some physical intimacy should be preceded by love. What people often being denial about developing a romantic relationship is ignoring the development of emotional intimacy. My point is, you can never fully be in love with someone (though you might have said that a lot to them) without being open and vulnerable to each other. Needless to say, there are some emotionally available people who avoid involving emotional aspects in their relationship. Very weird but it’s true. For all I know if that’s the case, it’s not love my dear, it’s just lust.
Perhaps you are right to call me a hopeless romantic for all that I secretly wished to develop in a relationship is platonic love, with a lot of developmental on the emotional intimacy rather on the other kinds. Or maybe it’s just love, without needing to be labeled as this kind of love, that kind of love, the A to Z kind of love. What I’m trying to say is that I wish to have a relationship that is grow and develops through time, in which the love inside of it also grows, with intimacies that also develop through all kinds of it, not the kind of relationship that is rushed and full of wondering of whether the partner is being honest or manipulative. I wish to have long and enjoyable conversations that are not just standard and frequent checking-ins, but true conversations that truly involve the two of us, though maybe sometimes they might be intellectually stimulating. I wish to have inside jokes that only both of us understand so that we can laugh it loud in a room of silence. Among all that, I wish to have someone whom I can have a deep connection with that is only can be built through time, and that is for me the truest form of romantic relationship.
This long writing is Part One of the contemplations, I suppose, though I still am not sure how long will I write about love. But this is the end of Part One.
