Tag Archives: love

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Friday Favorite: Misunderstanding “I Love You”

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Every Friday, I post a past post that was popular. This post was originally posted on November 20, 2011. Enjoy!

There’s a show on MTV that I catch sometimes. It’s called Friendzone. I don’t know why I watch it when it’s on. It’s half an hour of grueling emotional heartbreak and I never follow it all the way through to the conclusion.

The show follows a new couple of people every episode. These people have best friends of the opposite sex and have always felt something more for said best friends. The show is formulaic. It starts with the protagonist asking their best friend/crush to help them get ready for a “blind date.” The best friend/crush helps out. They go to the location of the “blind date” and then the protagonist reveals his or her feelings for the best friend/crush. It’s grueling.

The show bothers me for a couple of reasons. First, out of all of the contestants from this whole genre of MTV dating-type shows, I feel like I can actually identify with these people. These people are my friends, my peers. These are the people I give advice to when they tell me they have feelings for another one of our friends. I know them.

Second, it makes the assumption that we have no control over love. Love, though, is not an adjective. Sometimes, it is a noun, yes. But most of the time, it is a verb. It’s something we do, not something that does us. The hopeless, star-crossed lovers are a fiction. And that’s not upsetting or cynical. It’s just true. Sometimes you like someone more than that person likes you, and that sucks, but there is no reason to believe that because your feelings are so strong, you and that person are supposed to be together.

Third, it presupposes the only way to show love for someone is romantically. There was a 13th-century Persian mystic poet known as Rumi. He was pretty cool. He was doing things that the romantics and the transcendentalists would do almost 600 years later. One of his greatest works, Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (or The Works of Shams of Tabriz), was written for his friend and master Shams. When you read the poetry contained in the work, you feel Rumi’s love for Shams. The idea that a love for a friend can be spiritual and transcendental, mystical and inexplicable is pretty cool. We don’t have to be having sex with a person or moving toward having sex with a person to be profoundly altered by another human being. I have a couple of close friends who are girls. And we routinely tell each other that we love each other. And it doesn’t mean that we want to sleep with each other. It means that we know each other, support each other, believe in one another.

So after a thirty-minute show on MTV, I am sad. I am sad because these people don’t know that romantic relationships aren’t the end-all be-all of all human relationships and development. It is just one facet of a very complicated awesome web of people.

Have you ever crushed on your best friend?

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A Confession About My Romantic Notions

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I need to level with you. All of my brain energy that is left over at the end of the week, after all my responsibilities have been met, goes towards thinking about and obsessing over romance. I don’t share that with a lot of people because it makes me sound like a fourteen-year-old girl. It’s not something I’m proud of or want to continue doing. And I want you to think more of me than that. But I’m on this kick where I am trying to be a little more honest about things so we are going to work through some things today.

I don’t know the first thing about love. I have no idea. I’ve had my share of relationships. I’ve used the l-word sometimes. But I have absolutely no clue.

A while back, I decided that love was a choice – that all of these ideas about “falling” for someone are romantic fantasies. That’s not to be mean or pessimistic. I don’t think that love is any less intense because of that. I just think it’s a choice.

I also don’t think there’s one person out there for everyone. Yes, usually you are in a committed relationship with one person at a time; that does not mean that person is the only person for you. I think we construct stories about people to deal with the horrifying reality that is “till death do us part.” It’s freakin’ scary.

I was working Interview Day for my college a couple of days ago. A mother of a prospective student asked me if my college was my first choice. I grimaced. It’s not a fair question. The answer is no. It wasn’t. I didn’t get in to my first choice. And had I gotten into my first choice, I would have gone there. I tell people that it would have been a hard decision, but I know it wouldn’t have been. I would have gone in a second to the school that rejected me. But if I was given that decision again and this time I did get into my first choice and I was told exactly what my life would look like had I picked the pathI am on now, perhaps the decision would have been harder. I like where I am now. I like what I am doing with my life. I like the people I know. And so when people ask me if this school was my first choice, I usually answer that I can’t imagine being anywhere else. Because I can’t. I love it here.

So we create a narrative in which fate brought me here or destiny picks our soul-mates. Because it’s comfortable to believe that. It’s horrifying to think that we could have made the wrong choice.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a terrifying moment where my idea of love as a choice and my idea that there wasn’t one person out there for me came crashing together. How, then, do you determine the person you spend the rest of your life with? I have annoyed many of my close friends with this question over and over again. “You just know,” they say. Or as my parents like to succinctly put it, “It’ll come when you aren’t looking for it.” I think these statements are little more than tautologies. They aren’t helpful. They don’t serve as practical advice.

But then I started thinking about these statements differently. I read something recently that compared finding a significant other to finding a career, a life-mission. I thought that was stupid at first. Finding a career is easy. You just do and work until you find something you love and then you do primarily that one thing. And when I took the time to write that thought out, I realized the comparison to romantic relationships wasn’t that stupid. Because how do you explain to someone what finding something you love looks like or feels like? You can’t. It’s impossible. It just happens.

That’s the difference, then. I have always assumed I will have a career. I assumed that I was going to college. And so when it came time to make that decision, I made it with the best options that were open to me. But sometimes, I don’t assume I am going to have a family. And I wrongly think that the best way to finding my future spouse is through a string of committed relationships. Committed relationships are good, I guess, but they’re kind of like spending your adolescent years spending time at different universities until you decide to commit to one. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. You need the information from high school before you can go to college. But when it comes, you are ready to make that decision.

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What The Notebook and The Kite Runner Have in Common

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This doesn't have a lot to do with my post. Although, the "yes means yes" is a feminist formation of "no means no" so it kind of relates to my side note at the end. But I really like the blog this is from, and it's too good not to post. Some Ryan Gosling eye candy for your Tuesday night.

If you are a regular reader, you know that I think that Ryan Gosling is about one of the coolest people ever. I made this decision a long time ago when I was forced to watch The Notebook by a gaggle of girls. I say “forced” because I would never first watch a Nicholas Sparks movie of my own accord. But friends, neighbors, and countrymen, let me tell you that it takes very little to convince me to watch The Notebook these days.

The Notebook has one of my favorite scenes from any movie ever in it. When it’s on television, I usually flip back and forth with something more manly like Teen Mom until the scene happens. But once it does, I’m hooked. I have to watch the whole thing. The scene happens when poor-handsome-charming Noah (Gosling) and rich-beautiful-witty Allie (Rachel McAdams) are caught together late at night. Allie’s wealthy stuck-up father sends the whole town searching for his missing daughter and when she is found with Noah, she is forbidden from ever seeing him again.

Noah reaches Allie’s house just as the forbidding is happening. I haven’t seen the movie in a while (shame, I know) so I’m a little hazy on specifics here, but somehow, Noah and Allie get into a fight over the whole thing. Allie starts hitting Noah. And then Noah does the coolest thing ever, he starts hitting himself. It’s awesome.

This scene is relatively similar to one of my favorite scenes in all of literature. It happens in The Kite Runner. Amir (main character) and his servant/best-friend, Hassan, get into a fight one day by a pomegranate tree. Amir starts smearing pomegranates on Hassan. Hassan begins to pick up pomegranates himself and do the same. It’s a deeply moving moment, mostly because by this point it is relatively clear that Amir is doing horribly by Hassan. He is in the position of power in the relationship, and he regularly misuses it. And so Hassan’s submission is striking and hard to imagine.

I love these scenes because they are sacrificial. They show love that is so full, that the lover loses his sense of ego. It’s beautiful. There’s that song “Love is a battlefield.” It’s not. Real love doesn’t have winners and losers. In fact, people who think that end up being like Amir. They abuse and take advantage of the people they care about. Real love is about people working together.

[Sidenote: Sacrificial love is a tricky thing. There are a lot of people suffering out there because they are being abused by loved ones. That’s not right. Sacrificial love can only be sacrificial if it is a real, free, and true choice. If someone is demanding you to be submissive, that person does not deserve your sacrifice.]