How to love

"Life is inherently a little depressing. Some people fill that void with religion; other people fill it with constantly trying to find something exciting and passionate. Some people just accept it and find joy within those parameters." (Seth Rogen, 2012)

2015 is the toughest year in my life to date. Despite only a bit over a quarter into the year, I have experienced days that is so emotionally volatile that left me, for lack of a better word, spent. (It doesn’t help that for two consecutive months, I was also financially spent.) There is too much to say on why I feel this way, and truth is that it might bore most of you. I am someone who writes about the things that happened in my life based on my understanding of the matter at that point in time. My understanding is dynamic, it changes as I experience more things, and it gets challenged on a regular basis, and I openly struggle with a lot of these challenges. I do not have the answers to everything, and as it is right now, I have more questions that remain unanswered – and one of these questions is how to love.

Often we ask the question ‘do you love me’, and the person answering the question would hopefully answer truthfully with a ‘yes, I love you’, but we often don’t ask why we ask that question in the first place, or why we are given the question. The short answer is that we don’t feel loved; and this feeling is independent of whether the person who is supposed to love us (or has promised to love us) actually loves us or not. And as the person who is given the question, it is easy to take this so personally, that the persons we have been trying to love with our every being do not even realize that we love them this much. To put it in another way, it is very possible that we have exerted all that we can in an attempt to love these people, and they, for whatever reason, just do not feel our love.

I admit that personally, when I ask the question (‘do you love me’) out loud, I never take it seriously. Because on a deeper level, I feel that if the question goes as far as entering my mental space then it is obvious that I don’t feel the love this person has for me, thus the question is redundant. This can be attributed to: (1) there was no love to begin with; or (2) there was love, but it was terribly expressed. I use the adverb ‘terribly’ because I, as the intended recipient, do not get it. If and when this happens, I am of view that this is not entirely my fault, because who doesn’t want to be loved? I believe that we are all equipped with an in-built love preceptor as part of our biological make up. In fact, because of this, the reverse scenario is a lot more dangerous – when you feel love (or thought you were loved) when you were, in fact, simply not. You are either self-absorbed or just plain delusional.

And when I am on the other side of the equation, when I find myself on the receiving end of the question (do you love me), I don’t take it seriously most of the time. As far as I can remember, it is rare, if ever, that I actually get asked the question; I don’t recall any occasion whereby I was asked this question. I would like to think that this is because the people whom I love know that I love them, although how they know this remains a mystery to me. I would not claim that I know how to love; I would only like to think that I love the people whom I love well. I only love a selected, privileged few. Contrary to popular belief that there is more than enough love to go around, I choose to deliberately limit the number of people I love. To me, it is not about how many people you love, nor is it about who you love, it is about how you love them.

So how to love?

Whilst talking about love the other day, we got to talking about intimacy, and specifically, about sex. This is not the kind of talk whereby you discuss this is my favourite position, or this is how I got my first orgasm, but more like how it is an extension of love. I mean, like it or not, for those who have had sexual relations, it is a pretty important part of this whole love experience. This is not to say that you gotta have sex with everyone you love (please, in some context, it is just plain wrong) – more like when sex is missing, then you can really feel that something is missing. This sounds twisted, and if it does, I attribute this to my terrible writing.

Having sex is essentially an action – it is an act performed by two people who hopefully love each other. It is an act longed by two people who are hopefully more than attracted to each other (it is actually more like two people who are horny, but anyway). Sex gets bad rep these days, because it has been casualised; and this is not to say that it is impossible to be so; fuck buddies exist for a reason. Before all of these casualization business, sex was (and still is) an expression of intimacy – you learn how to be intimate, you learn to engage on a deeper level – and not just physically, but emotionally, and more importantly, mentally.

Or to put it differently, when you engage in sexual relations with a stranger, the aftermath of such acts often involve a feeling of emptiness that is more pronounced than before. As in, you felt the emptiness prior to the act, and perhaps the act was done in an attempt to fill this void, it did not. But sex with someone you love is more likely fucking satisfying – literally.

In fact, I think, everything you do with someone you love is somehow more satisfying. This is why you want to spend some time with people you love. This is why you get this unexplainable satisfaction out of being in the same room as they are, even when you two are doing two completely different things. This is why you happily interrupt each other because this is an opportunity for you to affirm each other – see this? See how stupid this is?

But the question remains how do you love someone in a way that makes him or her feel loved and simultaneously makes you feel you have loved. How do you compromise without losing yourself. How do you exercise compassion and understanding while still preserving your needs and desires. How do you change yourself for the better and not expect the other to change the way you want them to change, and instead accept who they are, strengths, weaknesses and everything in between.

How do you keep trying when all that you want to do is just give up.

I was lost in love. I fell in love with this one person; being in love with him was easy because he was (and still is) beautiful. I lost myself, I forgot who I was and more importantly, I forgot how to love. In all honesty, I am still largely figuring this out. I hope to continue to grow my understanding on the matter, and get better at how to love.

Or specifically, get better at staying in love, with those I love and yet to love, including myself.