Expects Of Love

(Hehz... so it was a lame pun. Sue me.)

And so I was musing to myself tonight as I was driving back home…

When does an affection for someone spill over into an overt attraction? And when does liking someone turn into loving someone?

A girl once told me before she rebuffed a guy who declared to her how passionately he loves her. “You don’t even know me that well” was her dismissal. She ain’t the first to do so, just as he ain’t the first guy to have told a girl so, only to be sent packing.

So how?

I was also reminded very very recently that one needs to be very careful when promising a girl the moon, or even just promising her his undying devotion, because girls take that stuff very seriously. When you fail to measure up to what you carelessly pledged in the heat of passion (harmlessly, so you thought), it matters a great deal to her, and has the power to hurt her very deeply when you fail to live up to it.

So how do I go up to a girl and declare the depths of my affection, without ever coming out as a liar? Telling her I “like’ her sounds woefully inadequate, yet it seems that if I tell her how much I “love” her, I would find that soon enough my actions are woefully inadequate to justify the use of such a strong word. As Ravi Zacharias once declared before, the word “love” has become one of the most used and abused epithet.

No wonder they say love is a trap.

Hehz…

I suppose that’s why they also say “love” is a leap of faith. Because persuaded as we might have been in the sincerity and genuineness of our professed love and devotion, we can never know for sure if we really meant it. Conversely, when our partner gives us that same promise, we are left in grave doubts as to whether or not he or she was being at best overly-confident, or at worse merely glib.

The one who truly loves would usually be the one who most acutely feels his or her inability to live up to the ramifications it entails. That would serve as the excuse for some who tell their partners they don’t dare to say they love them. Perhaps that’s the road Grace took, the excuse behind why she would tell me she never could decide if she loved me.

Yet somehow the “nobility” of that sentiment is tainted by the sense that it is a cop-out of what love really is. Our inability to absolutely live up to our avowal of love is no reason to therefore run away from the burden of committing to try. I would say that true love carefully and responsibly considers the implications, makes the promise to love, then spends the rest of its life trying again and again to live up to that promise.

Hard work?

You bet.

That’s why the nature of love is to be self-abasing. To borrow it out of context, love always says “you must increase, and I must decrease”. To run away from the courage one needs to make such a promise ironically ends up hurting the most deeply, the very one whom the person originally intended protect from let down expectations.

I guess if I ever do summon the courage to fall in love again, I would rather risk the disappointment of a love that at times fail to match up to my expectations, rather than to be hurt again by a relationship rendered sterile by the lack of courage to commit.

In other words, I think when I go after a girl, I’d tell her “I love you” instead of “I like you”.

Grins.

Hopefully when I do so, I won’t be sent packing.

Whether its by her, or by… erm… him.

Wuahahahaha…