Back in school they never taught us what we needed to know, like how to deal with despair, or someone breaking your heart. No one ever told me the effect of sharing myself with someone. No one told me the risk or the power that I hand over. I'd seen painful breakups on TV or heard about it from other people as they experienced it. I even dished it out more than I could have ever imagined. But no one told me the power I had been given and the responsibility that comes with it. No one told me how my choices and my words could actually physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually affect someone. How it could alter them for the rest of their life. We end up hurting the worst, the only ones we really love.
I was raised by television. I saw how Zack “loved” Kelly or how Aladdin “loved” Jasmine. To tell someone I love them is to tell them from here on out my well being is, to a degree, determined by what you say and do henceforth. And if that love is returned the same effect is applied to you. The degree is determined by the amount of love I give to that person. Once this exchange takes place (which can happen without my knowing) my selfishness negatively affects the person who loves me. My decision to stop loving that person doesn't just affect me. It affects the loved one, depending on the degree given out. Love is sacrificing independence.
Are humans suppose to date? What about other cultures? Are they wrong for having arranged marriages force two people into a relationship? Who's right? Which way is the way we are suppose to live? And if our way is wrong then it's already too late because I've already dated. I cannot undo what I have done and I cannot take back the things I've said or the feelings I've felt.
Am I suppose to be content moving on? Is it wrong for someone to not want to “move on”? To not want to date? The idea of forcing myself to “move on” and find someone else doesn't sound appealing. Am I suppose find another woman who also is trying to “move on”? Are we together suppose to ignore and suppress the memories and thoughts of our first loves out of loneliness and desperation for companionship? Are we to try and recreate the feelings we first felt with other people? Is the difference between a good life and a bad whether or not I get married? Is marriage the main goal in life? Do we put too much stock in marriage?
If everything is temporary and my relationship ended am I suppose to “move on” or was that how my relationship went and now it is over? Whether a relationship ends in a break up or ends with death the result is the same. At what point is it acceptable to say, “that was the person I loved and now they are gone.” Do you have to have been married? How long? Twenty five years, fifty years? Does time determine love? What if a mother loses her child within the first year of life? Before he was even given an opportunity to fully develop is that mother expected to “move on” and be content with the next child? The next child will NEVER be the first. If a husband of 50 years loses his wife and decides not to move on is that acceptable? If a young man loses his first love because he was ignorant after only a few years and decides not to move on why wouldn't that suffice? Where is the line? How many years or what percentage of life does someone have to spend with another person?
Clive Lewis said “We are half-hearted creatures,...We are far too easily pleased.” Should I settle? Should I follow suit with everyone in my culture? Are we too easily pleased that we simply meet someone else and try to ignore the past? Is it fair to the next person I encounter for me to have said the things I said, give the time that I gave, and feel the things I've felt, with another person? I'll never be able to tell the next person you are the only woman I love.
How do you love someone? Is it determined by how physically attracted you are? How many interests you have in common? The character of the person? People change. Does that mean that love changes? Does that mean that love is conditional based on how the other person grows or changes? Can someone fall out of love? How is it possible for arranged marriage cultures to have a lower divorce rate than dating cultures? Is love a feeling or is it a commitment? Is it possible to unlove someone? If it is possible then was it really love? If love is patient, kind, not jealous, boastful, proud, or rude, doesn't demand its own way, is not irritable, keeps no record of being wronged, never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful and endures through every circumstance can you unlove someone? If you manage to unlove doesn't that prove you never loved them at all? Is it even possible for humans to love?
If I'm suppose to unlove someone because they have used their free will to choose to not be with me then doesn't that put conditions on my love? I'll love you as long as you love me?! What if God did that? Aren't we suppose to love our wives like Christ loved the church? Didn't Hosea love Gomer like God loves us? Isn't love suppose to be unconditional? And if so, doesn't that include rejection? Can love be one sided?
Am I not allowed to think these thoughts? Who determines how people are allowed to think and feel? Just because the majority went through this and ended up the way they did then I suppose I'm suppose to just follow. And if I'm not satisfied with that then does that mean I need some pill or therapy so that I can think and feel like everyone else? What if everyone is wrong? This wouldn't be the first time the majority scoffed at the minority only to later discover they were the ones who were wrong. What if every relationship and person is different? What if every person's reactions are different? Does time heal all? Or do we just learn to live with the brokenness? Married or single, divorced or arranged in the end the person(s) you gave your ἔρως to doesn't belong to you and once you finish the race you have to give them back to the Christ.
I love this, and I love you.
ReplyDeleteYou're as subtle as a brick in the small of my back.
ReplyDeleteThe terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed – might grow tired of his vile sport – might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't.
ReplyDelete-Lewis
To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he's had his leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he'll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has 'got over it.' But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have simply written off.
ReplyDeleteDid you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.
-Lewis
I find that I don't want to go back again and be happy in that way. It frightens me to think that a mere going back should ever be possible. For this fate would seem to me the worst of all; to reach a state in which my years of love should appear in retrospect a charming episode – like a holiday – that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged. And then it would come to seem unreal – something so foreign to the usual texture of my history that I could almost believe it had happened to someone else.
ReplyDelete-Lewis
Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet her again only if I learn to love you so much that I don't care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, 'No toffee now. But when you've grown up and don't really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose'?
ReplyDelete-Lewis