a lot of thoughts...

and not that much clarity. Bear with me?




Thanks to some reading I've been doing and some lovely posts from wiredferret, I'm contemplating relationships. Without reproducing my whole rant on the soulmates subject... let me say I don't believe in the idea. A relationship, like anything else worthwhile, doesn't come as a gift from the sky, isn't thrown together for you by some deity who decided to ignore your free will... and won't work if you put nothing into it or put the wrong things into it or don't put the right things into it. No matter how right you feel together or how much you think you're fated to be together.

The concept I've been chewing on, I guess, boils down to love as an action and not simply an emotion. Ustinov said, Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. I do believe that that's part of it... taking the cycle of action - response - reinforcement and making it a habit. Because while the ideal is to be loved whether or not you love, whether or not you earn that love or feel you've earned that love or deserve that love... that doesn't happen until you've first gone through the tiny immature steps that aren't so tiny when you're living them. Someone told me rather recently that he finds it hard to care for someone who doesn't seem to care for him. What I've discovered is that that's true of myself, too, and I don't think we're alone. Of course, the opposite is true, too. It's easy to love when you know you are loved. So showing someone that you care for them usually brings a warming in them that brings them closer to caring for you... and that can become a habit, just as easily as taking someone for granted can.

That's the other flaw in the soulmate ideal. If my partner is supposed to love me no matter what because we're meant to be together, and it's always supposed to be good because we're soulmates... then what does it mean when I've gotten into the habit of taking them for granted and they start reacting to that, and things are going badly? Why, we must not be soulmates after all. And so the relationship gets discarded rather than worked on, because it's easier to go on waiting for the "real soulmate" than to stay and work out the current relationship. Because "the feeling just isn't there anymore." I'm guilty of that one, too... writing off a relationship because "the love wasn't there anymore" when I know that the feeling I was missing is a result of actions I didn't take.

Tidbit from something i linked to awhile ago... "absence makes the heart grow fonder," or "out of sight, out of mind?" Which is truth? Both are. It depends on what you think about while apart. And that I do know. I have this quirk... I send cards, every now and again, just because someone crossed my mind. And no matter how I feel when I begin to write, after thinking of that person for the minutes it takes to pen a message and send the card, even if the message is "hi, hope your day's going well," I feel closer to them. In fact, that's why I do it. It's an excuse to sit and think of nothing but how nice this person is and how much they mean to me, and it's a way to reach out and feel closer to someone I value.

there's a lot more to this subject than I can find words for right now. So what follows is... homework. ;)

( 'cause Wired said to... )