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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