Yesterday I met up with a friend, a very good friend, yet not my closest friend; a friend that I don’t see very often and, yet, if I were to ask myself which friend I love most dearly it would probably be her; it wouldn’t be my oldest friends or my closest friends, but her. So I started thinking about it. How can it be?
What is it that makes us love another?
First of all it’s a prerequisite that you know yourself well enough; you need to have heard yourself (1000 times at least). Otherwise, when you find yourself in a friendship (or any relationship for that matter), you spend too much time trying to define yourself, so you don’t really allow space for the other to just be and be heard. Only once you allow the others to be themselves you can truly open up to the possibility of loving them. And if you find that you do love them, then, surprise surprise, what you actually come to love is the them that you are not. That’s it! That’s true love. We don’t love others because they are like us. We love them because they have elements that we would like to have; because they are the us that we are not and we would like to be. We love them because we look up to them and admire them. That’s why I really love this friend. Because she has elements in her personality that I envy and I wish I had; elements that my other friends don’t have. Of course I love my other friends as well, so obviously they too have elements that I admire. It’s just that this friend of mine is more close to the me I would like to be.
And then, quite appropriately, that line comes to mind from Hal Hartley’s Trust: “respect, admiration, trust equal love.” So I start running a list in my head of all the friends or boyfriends I ever had…can it be? Yes it can! Love has nothing to do with romance – there’s nothing magical or electric or chemical about true love. True love is pretty straight forward, pretty cerebral, pretty down to earth. When you love, you know why. It’s all crystal clear. Of course we all want magic in our lives, that’s why we fall in love again and again. But I wonder, when it comes to getting serious, living together, having families…is romance enough? If it were, all these people getting married would be living happily ever after. Yet so many marriages fall apart. Why is that? I have come to the conclusion that it’s because people marry out of romance, and not out of love, or because they confuse one with the other. I mean, this is an instance in which one ought to be realistic. Romance dies eventually; no matter how much you might try to resuscitate it, it has an expiry date. So if there’s no true love beneath it, then what the hell is there left? In the best scenario, two broken hearts. In the worst, a beautiful divorce and children who have to forever live with the mistakes of others…but does anyone think of children that are not yet there when they are in love?
