Baby, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more.

Well, not that kind of love necessarily, but I’m thinking more of the very adult version of one emotionally mature human being loving another.  I’ve had to think a lot about it lately, and what is amazing is that I finally have a way to articulate all of this.  Earlier tonight, I had a discussion with a friend of mine about these things, and it was the first time I really put the words together and it felt right, so now that chatlog is saved as “inspirational.rtf” on my Desktop, and I will paraphrase what I’ve figured out here.

If you’re going to love someone in a mature way, you have to be a complete person on your own. You can’t look to another person to “complete you” because then you need the person, and as such have to live in fear of losing them as an intrinsic part of the relationship. You become jealous, and the relationship stagnates at a point because you cannot fully open up to the other person because you fear what they might see. You have to fulfill your own basic needs for acceptance without a relationship, or else it’s not as fulfilling as it should be.

Love, at its most basic level, is being willing to open up entirely to another person, and to desire to fulfill their emotional and physical needs without any expectations of reciprocation. This is, perhaps, the most basically “human” thing anyone can ever hope to do. Notice the lack of the word “responsibility” , or “obligation”, because everything has to be voluntary or else it risks becoming a chore. And we all know that, no matter how much we love our jobs (and trust me, I do), at some point we want to get away from it.

To achieve this, there has to be a willingness to communicate, to relate each other’s needs to each other in a clear way, and an openness about feelings for each other. Which requires that you know your own feelings, or else you are relating empty sentiments. It also requires a high degree of trust, because talking about how you feel about another person is a remarkably vulnerable state, and if you don’t trust the other person to respect your feelings, even if they don’t reciprocate them, then it is a horribly painful experience.

It is all ultimately about giving. A real, loving relationship is about giving to each other, and accepting and appreciating what the other has to offer. The most fulfilling part should not be what the other person gives to you, but what you yourself give to them, because in principle what you are offering is an extension of yourself, and the other person, in accepting, is accepting not just what you offer, but you as a whole.

But if one person is willing to do all this giving, and the other is still more interested in what they can take from the relationship, then there is incongruity,  and the person who is giving feels used and manipulated, and perhaps the person who is taking without giving freely feels guilty for not being able to offer up more. Perhaps they have intimacy issues, or some other block that is keeping them from moving forward. But such a relationship is not even co-dependent; it is a one-way street and eventually one partner or the other will tire of it.

So when love ends, as it frequently does, we should not feel bad about any harm we might inflict on the other person, or their ability to move on, because we have had a chance to share in each other, to be appreciated and accepted at our most naked, our most exposed, and though it might hurt to part from another person, ultimately if the relationship was positive, we should move on feeling positive about how the two have grown together, and now can offer even more to another person, no matter the reason for the end. If one partner cannot let go, then they did not get broken by the relationship, but they were broken going into it, or they allowed themselves to become defined by the relationship, and in this sense were not “whole” yet. But if nobody did anything malicious or underhanded, then it is nobody’s fault for any inability to progress except that own person.

I finally found the words to articulate all this, and I am very glad that I’ve been able to do it. Hopefully, one day, I’ll get to have this conversation with a teenager, and they simply will not understand it at the time, but maybe in a few years, they will.