A Humble Opinion
Alright folks. This seems appropriate for right now, and this is something I can’t believe I didn’t put into writing sooner.
I’ve learned a great many lessons in my life, and I stand to learn a great many more. But let me tell you something that I’ve learned that is, to this point, the greatest lesson I’ve ever learned.
You’ve heard me talk here before about my relationships: good, bad, and indifferent. And you’ve heard me freak out about various crushes, etc. You’ve also heard me talk about what I think love is. In all that discussion, I didn’t even mention the greatest love lesson I’ve ever learned. It’s time we go into this now.
If you’ll recall, I had feelings for a person back in Wisconsin for a long time. All of my undergraduate career, in fact. I thought about them all the time. My feelings for the person invaded my life. There wasn’t a place it didn’t touch. I spent all kinds of time thinking about our potential (and in my mind inevitable) relationship, and how awesome it was going to be. Looking back on it now, that part of the relationship probably wasn’t healthy. But that five or six years saw a lot of changes in me. A couple of years into that process, I had my realization that I had no clue what love was. After that, it threw everything into chaos, and I ended up being angry at the girl, because I thought it was somehow her fault I liked her, even though she’d done nothing to encourage me, and had been nothing but helpful to me along the way. I wasn’t sure if she knew I liked her, and that was another reason for me to be angry with her. Overall, I was still messed up, just to the other extreme. In time, about my junior year of college, I started to come to a few realizations.
The first and most important of these was that I couldn’t make this girl like me. No matter what I did, no matter what I said, or what external things I could try to use to hook this girl into liking me, there was nothing I could do to make her want me.
The second realization was that I had no idea what her feelings were, because I hadn’t taken the time to sit her down and talk openly and candidly about what was going on with me. It was very possible that she was clueless about the whole thing. (I’ve learned the habit of avoiding the girls I like, as a way of avoiding being detected.)
The third realization was that I didn’t know myself what I really felt deep down about her. I’d spent so much time thinking about it, that I had no idea what I felt.
After lots of soul searching and concentrating my attention on these realizations, I came to a couple of conclusions.
1. I was going to need to tell this girl face to face what I was feeling, once I got that figured out.
2. It didn’t matter what she said about the matter, or what her feelings were, that didn’t change my feelings. My feelings for her were not connected to her feelings for me. They were entirely separate issues.
And that second one is the key revelation, my friends. When I love someone, my feelings for them are not contingent on their feelings for me. If you catch yourself loving someone contingent on them loving you back, what you feel is not, I repeat, IS NOT love. It might be a lot of things, but one of the things its not, is love.
Since I’ve learned that, my eyes have changed in the way I see relationships. I look at all the people who try to blackmail others into loving them by professing love, and it makes me sad. You’ve all seen it before. One person is infatuated with another, so they get all worked up and tell them, expecting and basing their entire future, seemingly, on this other person’s response. The transaction is implicit-tell me you love me, or you’ll ruin my world. That’s blackmail, plain and simple. And I don’t think anyone does that on purpose, but I do think that the practice is ugly, and a mockery of love. And the even sadder thing is, is that it works. People are so afraid of hurting others that the shirk the truth in response.
When I finally went to the girl I liked and told her of my affections, I purposefully included the phrase, “I don’t want anything from you-I just want you to know.” And it made all the difference. It changed the entire tone of the conversation from her defending herself without feeling like she was being blackmailed to a great conversation I will treasure long after my feelings have gone. I simply told her what I felt, and asked if it was ok that I felt that way. At that point, I would have done whatever she asked in response to her, I just needed to know if it was ok that I loved her. She was more than alright with that, she just couldn’t do a relationship. And I knew that before I said anything, I just needed her to know that I felt that way. That experience was one of the most blessed in my life. I got the opportunity to share my feelings in a non-threatening way. And if she had been interested in her own will, she would have had the opportunity to share her feelings as well. There wasn’t any pressure, there wasn’t any blackmail, and afterwards, there wasn’t near the mess to clean up. I’m still friends with this young woman, and I wish her all the best and pray for her every time I remember to. All because I didn’t base my feelings on what her feelings for me were.
It would have been simple for me to get all angry when she couldn’t reciprocate, as though somehow it was her fault for what I felt, but since I decided before the discussion that I loved her and was going to show it in whatever way was best for her, it made all the difference. So, the lesson, my friends, is simple: Love the people you love, care for the people you care for, but don’t do those things as a way of trying to extort reciprocity from them. If you can do that, you’ll be much happier, and all the people you love will benefit, as will you personally.