I’m an extremely analytical person and so I’ve created a sort of checklist to allow myself to know when I’m in love with someone. Why is this necessary you might ask? Well, it’s important for me to be aware of my own emotions. I’m not the kind of girl who pursues shallow relationships just to satisfy my own needs, and so having a method to categorize my emotions becomes necessary in order for me to know how much of myself and my time I’m willing to devote to someone else. Some of these requirements actually come from the definition of the word “love” itself and are pretty straight forward. Either way, here goes:
- Having a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person
- Possessing a warm and personal attachment to someone else, as well as an affectionate concern for that person’s well-being (usually represented as a willingness to put that person’s needs and desires over my own)
- Having a sexual passion and desire for the individual in question (i.e., being physically attracted to the person)
- Recognizing their flaws and being willing to not only see past them, but to try to help them overcome them.
- Having a physical, intellectual, and spiritual connection.
- Having an insatiable curiosity to know about the other person: their goals, interests, thoughts, lifestyle, etc.
Believe it or not, there have only been 2 individuals who have met all of these standards, and although both cases have been unsuccessful and quite hurtful, they have also left me important lessons about love. Interestingly enough, I was reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a young poet,” and I came across a section that talked about love. It was very surprising to me how Rilke’s views on love are almost exactly the same as my own, and it is for this reason that I have decided to share:
“It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are life-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.
It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer. But how can they, who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?
They act out of mutual helplessness, and then if, with the best of intentions, they try to escape the convention that is approaching them (marriage, for example), they fall into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution. For then everything around them is convention. Wherever people act out of a prematurely fused, muddy communion, every action is conventional: every relation that such confusion leads to has its own convention, how ever unusual (i.e., in the ordinary sense immoral) it may be; even separating would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental decision without strength and without fruit.”
