Jan

11

The Consequences of Loving

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“Are you breathing, what I’m breathing

Are your wishes the same as mine

Are you needing, what I’m needing

I’m waiting for a sign

My hands tremble, my heart aches

Is it you calling?

If I’m alone in this, I don’t think I can face

The consequences of falling…”

These are the lyrics of a beautiful song by K.D.Lang, titled “The consequences of falling”. Of falling in love alone, of falling out of love without a safety net, of falling apart. Because inherently, one of the first lessons we are taught in this life is the cause-effect process and the consequences of our acts, of our attitudes, of our behavior.

When you’re a kid, it’s always easy for parents to persuade you into doing something with the promise of an ulterior reward. Religiously doing your homework in exchange for the bike you’ve been longing for or, at the opposite end of the scale, being grounded for 6 months if failing to pass the math exam. When you’re a child, consequences are always clear-cut and easy to figure out. You’re good, you’ll have your way. You’re bad, there’s no way for you than the highway.

Nevertheless, as we grow up, it all becomes a twisted and foggy game of causality and of phrases half-told, half-implied. You never know what will happen with a friendship if you act in a certain way, you don’t know how the love you share with someone will survive your or his betrayal, you don’t know how to interpret someone’s words nor do you have any idea how he/she will choose to interpret yours. Consequences are somewhat blurred and tricky to figure out, this is why we often times choose to simply disregard them and act as if there would be no tomorrow for our choices.

The most confusing thing of them all is perhaps the huge gap between the game as we knew it as kids and its actual, real-life rules. We were taught that behaving nicely, always telling the truth, never making someone feel bad or putting anyone on the spot is the way of having people liking you and responding in the same way. However, can we even take this into consideration anymore as a ground rule for any viable relationship of our days? When truth is responded to with lies, kisses with betrayals and honesty with dirt hidden under the rug, it is maybe time to switch to a different game plan.

When loving someone, just like most people I know, I never truly assessed the consequences of my falling in love with that person. Or, as a friend would say, I was only “one big open heart”, a heart playing by the rules it was once taught. “Treat people the same way you would like them to treat you”. Nevertheless, somewhere in between disappointing friendships and tear-shedding relationships I realized the irony and the freedom of this big game we all seem to play. It is no longer about treating people the same way you would like them to treat you, but rather it’s about having the upper hand, while being accountable to your own conscience.

In business, there’s a principle of negotiation called BATNA - Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, which states as a rule the fact that the party to a negotiation that is most likely to obtain the highest gain out of the entire process is the one who is less scared by the prospect of not reaching an agreement. Or, differently put, the one who has the least to lose - be it money, reputation, love - is the one who ends up winning. It stopped being about reciprocity and it started being about power and playing one’s cards right.

I am astonished to think how unwise and even careless I had played my cards before. Not only did I place them on the table from the very beginning, for everyone to see, but I had never considered my moves beforehand. I had never truly contemplated the consequences of falling for anything. For a job-deal, for a sales-offer, for an “ideal” man. No wonder my outcomes were so different from what I initially had in mind.

Probably the sad thing about all this is that, with all being accountable to our very own consciences rather than to the public disdain for our acts, there will inevitably be people whom, in lack of any scruples, will play their game regardless of who gets hurt or walked all over. They are not, however, the kind of people that I feel in competition with.

I truly find this game both empowering and liberating, albeit scary. Empowering because it places the choice in one’s own hands, liberating because it feeds out of your self-confidence and out of your own feeling of self-worthiness and scary…because there still are consequences of falling. There are still consequences of loving and you can always lose the control and re-become that “one big open heart”. There are no guarantees, there’s only experience…and with experience, there’s perhaps the wisdom of assessing with more accuracy from how high up we can fall without hurting ourselves…

 

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Jan

11

The Heart Holding the Aces

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Stock-exchange speculators often times lose fortunes in regrettably hasted placements or badly calculated deals. We usually label them as risk-takers, look up to their skillfulness in placing bets of millions and whenever the unexpected occurs, we just blame it on the volatility of the market. They were willing to take the risk, they lost, they’ll eventually bounce back and that makes them winners.

In love, however, things are rarely as clear-cut. We invest something even more precious than millions, we invest emotions, feelings, desires, we build our lives around the one possibility of getting the big lottery ticket, of closing our life’s deal - finding a soul-mate.

Unlike financial engineering though, we often lack the scrupulousness and tactical reasoning of choosing the best “stock” to channel our emotional investment on. Moreover, not only do we not assess the risk before betting all we’ve got on a likely-to-fail relationship, but when things go amiss we almost never blame the “volatility” of his feelings, but in most cases we blame ourselves.

We blame ourselves for not being sufficiently engaging, not having given enough love or not having been skilled in long-term maneuvers that would end up in marriage rather than in goodbyes. And then we give up trying for a while. We struggle to keep our gambler instinct under control, to keep ourselves away from the game table and detox our lives of the cumbersomeness of unrequited, failed love.

Nonetheless, those times always pass, they always fade away and our luck changes. Or at least we get the feeling that it’s high time it did. Investors often give up risking after a major crash, after seeing their wealth scattered on unsuccessful deals. Women, however, never do. More cautious, slightly bitter, with less lightheartedness, definitely without the same stars in their eyes but more down-to-earth, they try again. They pick themselves up and try again from scratch, every single time. And never fail to believe that it will come to them eventually.

And yes…women in love make the worst investors. They invest in the most volatile and unpredictable thing in the world - in love. They lose everything and yet they try again and again, with renewed faith. And they always seem to find the way of bouncing back, usually when their inner voice urges them to take a risk once again and to follow the intuition that all those who ever put their lives on the line for anything know very well…and know it by heart.

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Jan

8

Cynicism and Butterflies

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If someone were to ask me now the one thing I miss most about being in love…I wouldn’t need a lot of time to ponder over my answer. I know what my first thought would be. Butterflies. Perhaps a childish but honest answer, this is what I miss the most from the whole process of loving and being loved. Not the hand-holding, not the kisses under the moonlight, not the candlelit dinners. First and foremost, I miss the butterflies.

One of my favorite books ever is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince”. Every time I read it as a whole or merely re-read parts of it, I always seem to find new meanings and new ways of interpreting the words of the “Little Prince”. It’s like this book has a life of its own, a life that has unfolded along with mine, from the first time I got acquainted to the Little Prince when I was six and up to my 24-year old self, becoming increasingly meaningful. One of the quotes I love the most belongs to the Fox, whom, speaking about its meeting with the Prince, says: “It would have been better to come back at the same time of the day. If you come at four in the afternoon, when three o’clock strikes I shall begin to feel happy. The closer our time approaches, the happier I shall feel. By four o’clock I shall already be getting agitated and worried; I shall be discovering that happiness has its price! But if you show up at any odd time, I’ll never know when to start dressing my heart for you. We all need rituals”.

I miss that. I miss “dressing my heart for someone” and I miss that innocent feeling of butterflies in the stomach that only love can allow you to indulge in. The restlessness of waiting to meet “him”, the thought that there is another person, somewhere at the end of a phone line, a plane ride or merely at the opposite side of town who is having the same feelings towards you that you have towards him…that is something unique and fantastic. I miss that.

I have to acknowledge that my butterflies were not always legitimate nor true. In fact, in most cases they were the symptoms of a heart who needed rituals and wanted to dress itself up for that person, without having him reciprocate. And in most cases, butterflies became the messengers of ulterior heartaches and pain. Nevertheless, if there is one thing I could never regret having lived from my past romances and sorrows, it’s that infinitesimally small amount of time when I felt the butterflies. And somehow, I feel I was lucky to have that, although the outcome was never the happy one.

Maybe I had my share of butterflies. Who knows how much is “too much” or “not enough”? Maybe we are all allotted shares of this dizzy-dancing feeling of love and it’s all confined to our age of innocence. That time in our lives when everything is possible, when our life is full to the brim with love, when we haven’t experienced any sadness and we haven’t ever felt the bitter taste of a tear. Maybe it’s the same emotion that actors feel as a form of stage-fright, before getting into their routine and performing their acts in front of the audience without feeling anything special. Nobody has a lifetime of butterflies.

“Goodbye, said the fox. Now here is my secret, very simply: you can only see things clearly with your heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye… (…) It is the time you have wasted on your rose that makes your rose so important. People have forgotten this truth. But you must not forget. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose”.

It’s the love we invested in someone that makes that person so utterly important for us, so unforgettable. And it is that love that gives birth to that restlessness of seeing that person and being around him or her. We are just “tamed”. I wonder if I can tame anything or be tamed anymore. Now that I know better, now that I’m much more realistic, down to earth and ironic than I’ve ever been in my life, could I still allow myself to feel butterflies? Could I even aspire to that anymore? I don’t know.

I’ve had my age of innocence and I’ve had my share of butterflies. I’ve looked with my heart but I wasn’t wise enough to see things clearly. I needed time. Now…I would love to be able to dress my heart for someone again, maybe just for a split of a second…but I’m not sure if I can. Maybe love evolves from an age to another, it grows up alongside us, and just like us it becomes more realistic, more down-to-earth, less innocent, less prone to feeling butterflies.

The one question I still have pending in my mind and probably the one unresolved dilemma of my past is the impossibility to reconcile my feelings of love and of inner-butterflies with the cynicism of those for whom I was once dressing my heart for. I cannot help but wonder: has anyone ever felt butterflies and truly dressed his heart for me? Maybe. Maybe not. That’s not a question for me to answer.

I feel truly lucky and blessed with the life I’m living and I wouldn’t change anything. Most of the times, I feel comfortable just as I am. But there are nonetheless brief instances when I’m alone with myself and I experience a feeling of painful absence. Of missing something I never really had, but that I always longed for. Of missing the love that those butterflies were acting as messengers to. Maybe it got lost somewhere along the way. I am however confident and true to myself and I know how strong I can be. Now I know.

Maybe no one has ever dressed his heart for me, but there’s always time. And, with the risk of repeating myself, I will quote once again from my 21st century heroine - a writer like me. “Carrie Bradshaw”. “After he left, I cried for a week and then I realized that I do have faith. Faith in myself, faith that I would one day meet someone who would know that I was “the one” “. Just like her, I have faith that I would one day meet someone who would go through all the sweet trouble of dressing his heart for me…


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Aug

2

When You Know Nothing at All…

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We all carry with us lost loves with their traces. Some fade away with time, some remain ever present and choose to live in our memory forever. Every time a leaf falls on a certain sidewalk on which we first kissed, every time a certain song is aired on the radio, every time we pass a certain bench on the alley that we used to stroll hand in hand on…every time we do that there is something inside us that dies all over again. It’s like living that love story again, in the spacious stretch of a second, its birth and its death at the same time.

I once had a love like that. Or I thought I did. The kind of love that haunts you and refuses to let you go, the kind of love that resides in your thoughts and in the terms of comparison that you apply to all the people you meet, a love that is no longer with you but which is yet more present than ever. The irony of the heart…

It was convenient to think about my lost love. Convenient in an almost masochist and victimizing way, or, as Marguerite Yourcenar phrased it in her book “Alexis or the treaty of vain battle”, “It is easy to feel superior when you have suffered more and when you feel that the sight of happy people awakens in you a feeling of disgust for happiness”. I felt brave and superior in a way, I felt like I had experienced something so mind-blowing that it would never go away, that any love I may encounter in my life would be merely an epilogue of that “one” unique and lost love. I felt like the heroine of a great book. Yes, I shamefully agree that I sometimes seem to have a vocation for Danielle Steel moments.

Nonetheless, as I was sitting in my bed, half-awake, half-asleep the other night, with thoughts wondering away to past, present and future in an arbitrary way…I had the full revelation of the stupidity of my acts. And, with all due respect for my little drama queen that resides somewhere deep inside, like it does in any of us, I realized how empty and meaningless my great love had been.

No, it’s not wishful thinking, nor is it a way of finding inner peace and reconciling with the past, although I did achieve that as well some time ago. It was the most natural and unexpected full circle that I went through, realizing that all this time I had treasured in my heart a love which had only one actual actor. Myself. And no, I’m not saying it was an unrequited love. There were two participants in this love story, yes. However, it wasn’t a person that I was now mourning, it wasn’t his presence, his jokes, his smile, that I was finding particularly hard to forget. No…I was mourning my own feelings of happiness out of being smitten with someone. I was mourning the way he made me feel - alive, young, happy. In the end, as selfish as it may sound, it was about me. All the way.

I missed that love because it made me feel alive, it made me feel happy, it gave my heart a clear and specific purpose in a time in my life when I was searching for my own path. The magic of his presence was just the plain magic of love itself, with its butterflies. Like a 15-year old drinking her first glass of wine, it was only natural that I would become a bit dizzy.

And yes, I loved that dizziness that love made me feel, the “dizzy dancing way it feels, when every fairytale comes real”, as Joni Mitchell sang in the one song him and me shared. Looking back now, I feel that I somehow tried to console myself and in a strange way to depict myself as a martyr of this love, when, in the end, it had nothing special than the meaning I had willingly chosen to attach to it.

As I came to terms with this, I smiled. I was brave getting over that love but I feel braver now facing the truth of it all. And I cannot help but agree with Joni Mitchell. “It’s love’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know love…at all”.

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Jul

26

The Shallow Narrowness of Love

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People talk about “love” all the time. Ceaselessly. They all proclaim themselves human beings in search for eternal love and happiness and victimize themselves when their deserved love doesn’t come their way. It’s all about “THAT” person to make it all better, about “THAT” person to share one’s life with, about “THAT” person to lay all your love on. And I’m not just pointing out the finger, I’m often one of them as well.

Is love really that narrow? Is love all about having a significant other, the chest of whom to sweetly lay your head against, to have someone to kiss goodnight and walk hand in hand with, and then have babies with that person as a sealer of the love you share? Is love so incredibly superficial and void and is it all about what we own and about the people that are in our immediate surrounding ? What about the love we are supposed to share with the world, and I am not going to bring into discussion Christian nor Buddhist teachings, although I greatly believe in them. I will keep it simple and only bring into discussion those elements that can apply to the common sense of anyone, believer or non believer.

Can you really consider yourself a person able to love and worth loving when you are cruel to animals, cruel to other people, indifferent to the pain of others, still as a rock when hearing about the suffering of poor children, of victims of floodings or of old people forgotten by everyone? Can you really go home, kiss your “one and only” and gently put your head on his/her shoulder with no care in the world other than wondering if he/she loves you back? Are we people so incredibly shallow?

I know people who like to proclaim their love as if in a theater, for the public to see. They like to shower their beloved with love and care, to show what incredibly kind people they are. But, when all is said and done, they wouldn’t feel anything inside them move at the sight of a little orphan begging on the street or at the sight of a hungry dog whose eyes beg in a different, yet so similar way. Cause hey, that is not their problem. That little beggar or that stray dog are none of their business. Is love really that selfish and does it wear goggles all the time? Is it unable to see anything that goes beyond the sparkle in the loved person’s eyes? If so, I wouldn’t want that kind of love, then.

For me, love is intrinsically connected to kindness. You cannot truly love someone passionately and with all your heart and yet act cruelly and indifferently to helpless human beings who don’t ask for anything but your compassion. Which one is the real “you”? The one showering your lover with care or the one kicking the stray dog away with a “well-placed” shoot in the head? Which one is your genuine self and where do you draw the line?

I always said I would never date someone who is indifferent to the challenges of the world we live in. More important than his bank account, the brand of his car, the color of his eyes or the glamorous job he has is the way he treats other people. Not just the way he treats me. How could you trust a person who mistreats people and animals that are weaker than him?

Can you really “make believe” that he’s incredibly kind to you and that the rest is just…circumstantial evidence? What if one day that loving sparkle in his eyes that he has when he mirrors your look will become the same shallow and indifferent grin that he shows to the rest of the world? Why are we all so damn tempted to see ourselves as the exception to the rule and then cry a river when we cease to be that exception? Were we even one in the first place?

Perhaps we are too shallow ourselves to be able to gather that we are living and we are treated “by the rule” rather by its corollary. If a person is cruel to everyone, except to you, maybe it’s high time you asked yourself it it’s really like that or if it’s all in your head. I, for one, would be much more impressed with a guy that showed an open heart and compassion towards the less fortunate rather than with a guy driving a BMW but that couldn’t care less about the exploited children in Cambodia if that would prevent him from getting his trendy Nike shirt.

Perhaps I seem very complicated. Hmm…that’s probably because I am. But in the end, the important thing is that I know who I am and what I am looking for. We should all pay better attention to our inner needs, to the things that move us and that mean something in our life and refuse to give up on them. Even if it makes the path a bit harder for us, it certainly makes it much more rewarding. And it makes everything worthwhile.

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May

16

The Expiry Date for Love

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Does love really turn old? Does it ever run past its expiry date and simply wither away? And, more importantly, who sets that date? What exactly in our behavior, in our feelings, in our loving gestures or caressing moments, sets that clock ticking until the day in which the red light bulb starts pulsating and the alarm simply turns on, informing you that your love is now over?

Is there any moment in which you know? Any revealing instance where you have a gut feeling that you will not get to grow old with the person that is holding you in her arms? Is there any glimpse of lucidity in the midst of love and passion in which you ruthlessly tell yourself that everything is heading towards the end? How do we know when love is dead and can we really tell when it is so?

We go through life building models and looking up to people whom have obtained what we are secretly and intimately seeking as well. Accomplishment, personal fulfillment…that array of terms that most of the times we simply summarize under “Love”, the one word that brings them all together. We admire the long standing relationship of our high school friends, the enduring love of long-distance lovers, the noble persistence of constantly challenged love. And deep inside we wish for that day to come in which we would feel the urge of being part of a couple too, of partly letting go of “ME” and “YOU” in the endeavor of building “US”. And we secretly wish for someone who would awake that kind of urge in us to finally come our way.

What happens when it all falls apart? When you find out that the happiness of the people you were once admiring was merely a castle made of cards that a third person merely blew away in one single breath? When you wipe the tears off the faces of people whom you had always admired for their laughter? And, essentially, how can we wholeheartedly trust love again when what we considered to be its symbols fail us?

When it comes to love, it all boils down to what my grandfather once told me, reminiscing of his love for my grandmother. Faced with a pile of questions from the 17-year-old teenager disappointed of love, he merely looked at me with loving eyes and said “You know…two people will never be together if their stories don’t meet”. Stories? Such an old-fashioned term for a teenager to hear and, moreover, to take it as a viable piece of advice. Nevertheless, his words stayed with me and always will. Every time I’ve had a love traveling in and out of my life, I simply recalled his words and they made everything seem so incredibly simple and logical. Our “stories” simply hadn’t met. It was as simple as that.

What happens, however, when people’s stories meet and grow apart again? Can you really be profoundly in love with someone for a decade of your life and then simply decide to switch stories? Can you simply let go like you let go of a broken shoe or an old blouse that is out of fashion? If he were still here, my grandfather would probably say “What was meant for you will eventually happen. And that love that was set aside for you will eventually find you”. I believe in that with all my heart, because his words speak the truth, a truth that I remember every time I look at the photos of him and my grandmother or every time I look at my parents together.

Nonetheless, I often wonder if our 21st century hasn’t run out of “stories” for us to star in. Are we so caught up in our individual dramas and self-centered goals that we forgot to be part of a bigger picture? Of sharing our story with someone? Or should we simply take the failures of those around us as a mere sign that their stories weren’t straight, that something better was awaiting them?

It is much easier to question love and to doubt it whenever love is falling apart around you. It is nonetheless a sign of courage and boldness not to. To continue believing in happy-endings and to continue searching for that one story in which you will get to be the leading lady or the leading man. And to know deep inside that every failed lover will eventually find one of his own.

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