On what love is

You know, during the rare times that I spend sometime with a real writer, he/she would always go "you should write that in your blog". I am waiting for the day that these people would just use "you should blog that". Kidding.

Amongst the plethora of things that I was talking about, the one topic that people love to discuss is this concept called love. At the most basic level, we have an idea of what love is, that thing you feel, you know. BUT the definition of love is often very subjective. Forget the bible temporarily and think about how you define love.

Now that I think about it, quite a lot of fights that I had with my exes were about their definition of love, which do not overlap with mine. I blame this on the fact that I am a Sagittarius (I don't do horoscopes, really, but I do find the description of Sagittarius almost fits me perfectly, so I go by the label to just make conversations easier). I have this inherent need for this thing called freedom.

This subsequently mean that I do not respond well to the sort of love that requires a high degree of obsession. The kind of people who say "if you love me, then you should not do A,B,C etc". I get that there are boundaries in any relationship, but I don't think these boundaries can be enforced in this way. My parents play this game all the time - well, to be fair, not all three of them. I wonder how I am going to be as a parent, if I am ever blessed enough to be one.

I think love is often confused with possession. I subscribe to the school of thought that to love does not always equal to owning something. I think love is waaayy bigger than that. To limit love to possession is selfish and restricting. Case in point, I love designer handbags. Who can make skulls as cool as McQueen? I do not own a single McQueen clutch, despite loving them so desperately. Just because I don't have it does not mean that I don't love it. The same deal with people. I love a lot of people in this life, and it does not mean that I have to "own" them, as in I have to have them (in the animal, primate sense). I much prefer that we are friends, of course, and for them to be comfortable in the knowledge and the fact that I do love them (because what is love is not shared with the object of love itself). BUT I don't want to own them and I don't want them to own me.

I may be delusional in subscribing to this school of thought. I may be the odd one out. I may be alone in all of this. It is ok. This works for me, for now.

I don't regret every single one of relationship or even friendship that I had that did not last a life time, partly because of fundamental differences in definitions of concepts and boundaries of what love is. In fact, I am thankful that I no longer have to put up with people who cannot even respect my point of view or even worse, dismissing it just because of my age. No more of that.

I believe in the freedom to choose and the freedom to respect. I am happy to respect everyone insofar as they are worth respecting. (Some people do these things that make it really hard for me to respect them - such as, for example, people who promise they will do A, and you count of them on this, and they end up doing Z for no apparent reason aside from the fact that they don't feel like doing A any more as it is more convenient for them, irrespective of the fact that you were counting them do to A).

Respecting people means respecting their subjective opinions on how they view the world and how certain things mean to them. In turn, I'd like to have the same kind of respect - but I get that not everyone is like me, so the fact that I respect others do not always translate to them respecting me back. That is a risk that I have to take to be the person that I am.

So this was the long version of the conversation that I had on Friday night, with too much wine and too much fun. Talking is so much fun when one is drunk.