what is love (baby don't hurt me)

I really need someone to occupy my chest.  When it comes to love, I'm the 99%.  (Is it too late to use that play on a phrase?  In my defense, I've been working on this entry for a while so I came up with it way before it became played out.)

I've pretty much eliminated the word "love" from my vocabulary.  I kind of feel bad about it but I guess not bad enough to actually do anything to remedy it.  And, really, what could I do?  I guess I just don't feel comfortable using that word because I really don't even know what love is or what it means to me.  I'm not even speaking about romantic love but just love in general.  I suppose I've always assumed it to mean a great affection for someone or something but for some reason, it doesn't feel that simple anymore.

And I think I used to love.  I felt affection for people, cared for them.  I wished the best for them and hoped they were okay.  I suppose that was love.  But the one person I cared for the most, someone I believe I loved at one point, completely shut me out in an instant and  ruptured my world forever.  And that's when my idea of love fell apart.

Why does it seem like the people that you give the majority of yourself to are the ones who hurt you the most?  I guess it's because you invest your time and your heart into that person so that you are more connected to them than anyone else.  You become vulnerable.  Your defenses are down.  You are allowing someone else to come into the soft fleshy places, sensitive spots that hurt when tampered with.  I suppose the tightest ties bleed the most freely when cut.

And on a somewhat similar yet different strain of thought, why is it that two people who are so in love can end up hating each other so much?  It always perplexed me how girls and guys get into relationships, become partners in crime, then suddenly turn into each other's worst enemy.  Things turn sour, love turns to hate, and it takes a while for that hatred to boil away.  I suppose some couples who split do so amicably and remain friends.  But it doesn't seem to happen often from what I've seen.  The breakup is usually ugly.  And I wonder why that is.  What does it take to get to that point?  Abuse?  Infidelity?  A love that has died?  An understanding that you are on a different path than your partner?  When does heartbreak turn to hate and is it always justified or only under certain circumstances? 

So that whole experience with being cut off from my friend really screwed me up.  Now, I don't believe in love because it feels like someone who loved me wouldn't do that to me, no matter the excuse.  Some would argue that's not real love but I'd hate to think she didn't love me.  I used to have a hard time believing anyone could love a mess like me but she gave me hope, made me feel that I could be loved despite my plentiful flaws.  It wasn't a case of her saying she loved me and me not believing her.  I knew enough of her to know that she did.  It wasn't always in the words but in the gestures and actions, in how she made me feel, how we made each other feel.  I held onto that and it helped me to feel like a real person.  I'd hate to know that it wasn't real, that what I thought was love wasn't.  But what was love to me back then?

She made me not believe in love.  She even went as far as to make me stop believing in friendship.  At the same time, maybe there's a small part of myself that is making me not believe in it, or at the very least, not allowing the microscopic part of myself that still does believe in it to actually experience it because I'm not sure I can go through another rejection like that.  I don't want to work on something for so long, give so much of myself to another person just to have it all torn down one more time.

It's so silly because I used to council people in my predicament when I was in high school.  These girls broke up with their boyfriends and they came to me to vent and said they'd never fall for another guy, never let them get close because it hurt too much when they left.  And I always said that not every guy was going to do that to them, not ever guy would hurt them and they'd be missing out by keeping their hearts so guarded.

Now, here I am, the guy with the guarded heart, eating my own words.  Sorry, girls.
I guess I now know how they feel.  Advice is easy to dispense when you haven't gone through that situation.  Now I see why no one ever listened to me.  Sure, it makes sense to keep loving freely but it's more fragile than that.  The heart is more fragile than that.  You don't just get hurt, heal, then move on.  Sometimes, you get hurt irrevocably.  And maybe you can eventually get up and get on with your life but not all wounds close up so pink and pretty.  Sometimes there's a scar, a raised reminder that love hurts, that the heart is not a rough and tumble toy.  I suppose I never considered the amount of pain involved.  And no one likes pain.  Most people don't willingly go into a situation knowing there will be hurt involved, not unless it's really worth it, not unless it's a sure thing.  But with love, is it ever a sure thing?

The older I get, the further I'm removed from my initial concepts and ideas on love.  I'm going to sound like a total chick here but I used to think love was all about romance and passion and what you'd see in the movies.  Don't blame me, I didn't have a lot to go on.  My parents fought a lot when I was younger and so I didn't have them to turn to.  I only had Disney films and YA books and the secondhand sex stories from classmates to shape what love meant to me.

But over the years, I've learned that the passion doesn't pack the punch it used to and romance loses its vigor with age.  And at first I found it disappointing but it doesn't have to be.  When the fiery surface feelings fade, deeper connections form.  Or is it just a cold form of comfort?  You spend so much time with someone, invest so much of yourself in them, that sometimes it can feel like it's not worth the effort to separate.  The passion, romance, and sometimes love, is gone but it's too much trouble to find someone else.  You've built a routine that separation would disrupt.  Might as well stick with your wife because she's available to pick up the children from soccer practice.  Might as well stay with your husband because he makes really good money and you're used to your nice bags and dinners.  You don't want to have to enter the dating game again, lose that weight, pretend you don't fart and be self-conscious of your words, behaviors and unwanted body hair.  You don't want to upset the kids.

Of course, this isn't always the case.  I believe that some people really can fall into a category of love consisting of many levels and remain within those levels for the rest of their lives.  It might not always be red-hot but there is warmth to be found.  But it's not always that way and for me, it seems like I've seen a lot of comfort in relationships but not a lot of love.

I'm not sure why I turn to my parents for what to look for in a marriage.  I certainly don't turn to them for race relations or religious tolerance, so why should I equate them with romance?  Anyhow, as I mentioned, they fought a lot when I was younger.  They used to yell and hurl nasty insults at each other, right in front of my young and impressionable face.  It scared me and it hurt me.

I remember during some of their fights when I would come out of my room, and although I only came up to my dad's knees, I'd hit him in his legs for yelling at Mom, I guess thinking if I did something, I could stop the fighting, tell my dad how stupid he was for being mean to her.  But I don't know who's fault it really was.  I was a mama's boy so I automatically took her side.

I also remember the yelling was so bad that I could hear it through the thick walls.  I turned the television up as loud as I could and sometimes I'd beat on my desk to try to drown out the screaming and swearing.  I guess it worked because my mom tore through my bedroom door and shrieked at me to stop the banging.  Her eyes were on fire.  There was so much rage there that it shook me.  It was as if she hated my dad.

I came home from playing with my cousins one day to find the inside of our home literally destroyed.  Pictures that previously hung on the walls were scattered on the floor, glass jagged and broken in the carpet, sheets off the bed were shredded, feathers oozing out of pillows on the ground, chairs overturned, dishes divided into a million pieces on the linoleum floor.  It looked like a war zone.  I could feel the negative energy still charged throughout the house.  I looked around in horror.  I went to my room and cried my eyes out.  Fortunately, they hadn't touched anything in there.  I don't know how I would have managed to sit among the physical ruins of my parents disintegrating marriage.

Then there was the time they talked of divorce and the time I couldn't take their fighting anymore and I broke down in front of my mother, screaming at the top of my lungs, hot tears streaming down my face, telling her to stop screaming and yelling at dad, telling her I couldn't take it anymore, telling her it hurt me to hear them doing that, that I didn't feel good at home with the way they acted.  And she just looked at me, as blank as I've ever seen her and calmly said, "Okay.  We'll stop."

And they did.  Eventually.  And they never got a divorce.  But those moments have stayed with me.  The arguments and the look in her blue eyes turned red still stay with me.  I wonder if they were ever able to resolve whatever issues they had or if they simply gave up and stayed together out of convenience.  Divorcing would have been expensive and inconvenient.  They would have to have divided up their money and their children and maybe they were both just too tired to go through the hassle.  And maybe they didn't love each other like they used to but I suppose they didn't hate each other enough to make a move.  So, there's that...

I still worry about them.  I think they still love each other but I also wonder if they are on fire for each other.  I don't want them to make out at the dinner table or anything but I just wonder if they are deeply in love or just comfortably numb.  I wonder if they still desire each other or if they've just settled.  I know couples fight and sometimes it can get pretty rough but this felt beyond rough.  Maybe it felt that way because I was ten and the grown ups were yelling and it all felt frightening looking up at them putting each other down.  And it just felt to me like there was no coming back from that kind of chaos. 

Their relationship, whether they realized it or not, and how I'm just realizing it now, has molded me in a way that I haven't been able to shake since.  

I also wonder if it's really probably for two people to stay together for the rest of their lives.  Sure, it's possible and it happens all the time but you also see a lot of separation.  Isn't the divorce rate still about half?  Maybe that doesn't really reflect love.  Maybe that just reflects people jumping into marriage too quickly or for the wrong reasons.  Maybe it reflects people falling in lust, not love and being too horny to recognize the difference.  Whatever the case, it's still disheartening.  And maybe I'm just disillusioned which is slightly annoying because I'm not really sure I have anything to be disillusioned about.  I've never been in a relationship, never known romantic love, but I have had my heart broken.  Doesn't that still count?  I wasn't even romantically involved with the person who straight up cut me out of her life but I did love her all the same and it messed me up all the same.

How do I recover from that?  How do you move on without your heart?  How can you even get it back when it feels so permanently pummeled? 

I'm just not a relationship person.  I'm way too sensitive.  If I could be so torn apart over the ending of a friendship, can you imagine how far off the deep end I would go if it was someone I had a real romantic connection with?  I'd probably shoot up a post office or cut out their heart and then send it to their new lover in a box of chocolates like jilted lovers in horror movies do.

I do think that I am partly guarded but I also think that maybe I'm just not equipped to love people.  I look at my coworkers and realize I don't love any of them.  I don't even like most of them.  I look at my old high school classmates and it's a bit trickier because we all have spent most of our lives together but does time equal love?  I'm not so sure.  There are certainly one or two people I don't dislike but I'm not sure I love them.  Maybe I like them but not even enough to consider them a friend.  I look at my college classmates and they feel like strangers to me now.  I look at my grandparents and realize I don't even know them.  I look at my sister and find I still don't like her.  I look at my parents and only see how much they get on my nerves.

And then I look at me.  I don't really love myself, either.  Why should I?  I'm a neurotic tool who craps on everyone.  I'm judgmental but I'm also an equal opportunity a-hole.  I look down on other people but I look down on myself as well.  I'm fat.  I'm insecure.  I'm paranoid.  I'm a loser.  Who am I to judge anyone else?  I'm no better than the people I judge but I can't help but to see the silly things humans do to themselves and to each other and feel superior in my diluted knowledge that I don't do those things (although I do).

There are times when I think I'm okay with not being able to love.  With that out of the equation, it does simplify things to some degree.  I don't have to worry about relationships or pesky hurt feelings getting in the way of me focusing on my misery.  No, romantic entanglements only complicate things.  And I'm not emotional mature enough to handle any kind of complications at this point in the game.

But then there are times when I really do wish I could love again.  Although I'm mostly expired, there's still the ghost of a pulse that lies deep within me, a small section that my death has not yet reached and sometimes I can feel it's muted thump reverberate in my head, signaling memories of the days when I was young and full of love.  I had a healthy heart and no one to give it to and that made me sad but now I wonder if I could use that love to just be good to other people.  I don't need to be in a romantic relationship to give my love away.  I could use it on friends and family and even strangers.  Isn't that what Jesus wishes us to do with our hearts?  Love my neighbor?

I still like the idea of love, even if it has transformed and lost its charm over the years.  Even if I can't feel it within me anymore.  Even if I'm cut off from it.

But the idea of spreading love brings up another issue.  I think people use the word "love" too freely.  Some people say it to everyone and while I think it's a nice gesture, I think the overexposure of love, much like the overexposure of Adele, somehow deteriorates it's quality.  You hear it so much that it begins to lose it's meaning, like how you can repeat a word over and over until it feels foreign on your tongue.

As much as I'd like to tell people I love them, I don't want it to lose its meaning.  I don't want to say it so much that people think I'm not being genuine.  "Oh, well he says that to everybody so I guess I'm not really special."  Because how do you feel when someone says they love you?  Special.  And everyone should get to feel that way, which is why it's good to spread that love to as many people as you can.

But, once again, what is love?  What does love mean?  What does it feel like?  How can you differentiate it from the multitude of other feelings you can have toward an individual?  Do we mistake friendship for love?  Lust for love?  Interest for love?  How do you go beyond friendship and into love?  Whoa, back up.  How do you even get to friendship?  I have to remember, I'm starting from the bottom up.

I'm constantly struggling with who I want to be vs who I am or what I've become.  I struggle with love and connections to other people.  I've never had a true best friend and never been in a relationship so being involved with other people in any capacity is awkward and painful for me anyway and it's even more so when I find myself actually liking the person (and I mean liking in a platonic way, not romantic).  I don't know if I give too much or hold back too much because, unlike most of my peers, I just haven't had the chance to practice on many people.  I don't know when I'm coming on too strong or being too standoffish.  I'm always apologizing for my behavior, as if I'm intruding on someone else's life by trying to simply talk to them.

And I suppose because I haven't had much practice with people, when I'm let down or rejected or if things don't work out between me and someone else, I take it in and let it affect me to a higher degree than it would someone who was more well-versed in human interaction.  I don't care for the majority of the people I come across and so when I do take an interest in someone, I suppose I go too far too fast.  While I might restrain myself on the outside, internally I am letting my feelings swirl intensely inside me.  I can go through an entire emotional roller coaster over one person without them even knowing it.  I should probably stop that.  It's obviously not healthy.

I don't know if I'll ever know what love is in all its capacities or in any form at all.  Maybe it's a lot like having children.  They say people who don't like kids will change their mind when they have little ones of their own.  Maybe it'll take taking on a lover to change my thoughts about that as well.  But I don't see that happening.  There are times when I think I am too sensitive, too damaged, too old, too far gone to try to resolve my struggle with amore and affection for people.  As much as I'd like to divorce myself from the painful aspects of love and start fresh with a new hopeful outlook, I fear I've done what I feared my parents have done, what many couples have done: given up.  I've become complacent in my lack of love and I've simply settled on being bitter because it's too much work to try to change things.