What is
love? It is so subjective. Everyone has different meanings of love. For me, it
could mean the affection and sincerity of family and friends. For someone else,
it could mean……
I won’t deny
it. This is going to be a tough post to blog about. I am
only a teenage boy.
What do I know about love?
So, let me
try again.
Love for a
friend could mean wishing them well for any upcoming important events (like an
interview) to show you care about them…..
Love for a
grandma could mean holding her hand when she walks up a flight of stairs……
Love for a
pet could mean bringing them out for regular walks…..
And the list
goes on and on.
I was
talking to a few friends about college life and it naturally diverged into a
conversation about crushes.
Can crushes be categorised as loving
someone?
Anyways, I
was confessing to them as having this one crush but the affection faded away.
Fading….if you were to marry someone, what happens when the feeling fades away?
And this is
what scares me about love.
But love is also so magical….
1. The twinkle of your partner’s eye
when you tell them a humorous story.
2. The little touches of your fingers,
gingerly reaching for your hand.
3. Smile, so sincere, when they see your
face.
It goes on…
From being
acquaintances, to friends, to close friends, to closer friends, to a couple, to
life…
Love is so
special because if you love someone from your bottom of your heart, you feel
complete, infinite. Even if it lasts for a short time.
To quote an
excerpt of Hazel’s eulogy to Gus in TFIOS:
“……so instead I will talk
about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this. There is an infinite amount
of numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite
collection of others. Of course there is a bigger infinite set of numbers
between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than
other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many
days of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers
than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than
what he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our
little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You have me a forever
within the numbered days, and for that I'm eternally
grateful.”
What do I feel about love?
I feel that love is a feeling that must be mutual.
It must coexists between partners. It must come from the heart. Love, for me,
is about celebrating someone else’s strength instead of
stepping down on their weaknesses. Love takes time to nurture, sometimes a lot
of time. But with hard and sincere effort, it can be so so special, so amazing
and so irreplaceable.
You get what you put into life. And it should apply
to love in the same way.
But, for me, loving someone else also means you have
to love yourself first.
I remember a year back, and I had this crush. So I
started talking to her and we got a bit close. Back then, I was so immature
about love that I thought I found ‘the one’. After a few Skype calls and being
so delusional about it, I realised she was not into me in the way expected her
to be. I was trying so hard. It’s like hitting a ball into a wall but instead
of bouncing back, the ball remained stucked into it. But I kept on
‘celebrating’ her strengths and hoping for a change but it never came.
Suddenly, it
dawned upon me. I was not EVEN ready to be in a relationship. First, my results
were utter shit. Second, I do not have the commitment to pursue this. Third, I
do not even have a clear view of what I want to do with my life. And if I
needed more reason, all the effort I am putting doesn’t produce any results.
So, I stopped everything. Stopped texting her.
Stopped the calls. Stopped everything.
And I told myself that I have to be a better man for
myself. Pursue my own dreams first before accommodating another person’s
dreams. :)). How do I
inspire another person if I cannot even inspire myself?
But for all the couples, gong gongs and popos,
aunties and uncles, boyfriends and girlfriends who are still alive, with love, be
it a small flame of it or even love with overflowing passion, I salute you.
Because love makes us sane. Love has the ability to push yourself to your
limits, to make you realise what you want in life.
I want to quote a singer whom I really enjoy…
“Loving can hurt, loving can hurt sometimes…
But it’s the
only thing that I know, know….”
-Ed
Sheeran-
So, compromise your partner’s mistakes and faults because we are not robots who do things with 100% accuracy. We are only human. Choose instead to appreciate the
strengths.
But what do know?
I am only a
teenage boy. What do I know about love?
