Love is a battlefield
There is no place in this world where you and your friends can’t speculate about love. Whether it’s over shrimp dumplings and noodles in
It all springs from that eternal question marked in our minds with indelible ink, ever since that first time our grade school classmates thrust an autograph book our way and we wondered what to put in the query “What is Love?” Yes, we all want to know what love is. If it could just be as easy as showing it (as Foreigner suggested in their enduring power ballad), no one would be talking about it. Unfortunately, even capturing love in words is infuriatingly impossible. Try to recall the last answer you scribbled with your stubbly pencil to “What is Love?” in your classmate’s autograph book. Chances are, your current response to the same question is as vague, cliché, and slightly amusing. (Raise your hand if you’ve written “God is love”. Yeah, me too. Raise your other hand if you’ve written “Mom” or “Dad” under First Kiss. Yeah, me too.) No surprise there, as we’ve spent years exposed to kilig-inducing love teams, love-conquers-all-and-against-all-odds types of romantic triumphs, kissing scenes in slow motion, and flawlessly-phrased declarations of love in all forms of entertainment. Part of our notion on love comes from all of these, even as our logic screams that these are simply elements of a romance formula in showbiz, that these are all made up and crafted simply to distract us from everyday realities.
Perhaps our conversations about love are our anchors back to real life. The more we talk about relationships, the more we realize what complicated and unpredictable creatures they are. Even defining what a relationship is calls for a full-blown debate. When can you say two people are dating? Is it when they are regularly going out while getting to know each other or when they are officially together? Is someone you’re “dating” automatically your boyfriend or girlfriend? Couples are now unable to define themselves that Friendster had to create a new relationship status (“It’s Complicated”) just to help them. (When is it not complicated?) We always try to define and categorize ideas to try and understand them more, and we can’t always rely on our happily-ever-after notions of love to help us clarify practical questions on relationships.
More than grappling for its definition, we also want to know what to do when love or something like it starts banging on our door. We tend to think in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure when it comes to relationships (whatever happened to good old Technicolor?). When faced with a decision, each action can bring you to totally different pages. Which page do you want to be in? Which page should I be in? As much as possible we want to do the right thing because hearts are involved—ours and others as well. If there’s one thing that media doesn’t exaggerate, it’s the agony of heartbreak. (Also, our pride would not take the embarrassment of the wrong decision.)
There are so many questions when it comes to relationships; who knows how many of them actually get answered? More aptly, who is ever satisfied with the answers? After years of these love conversations with different sets of friends, there are only more questions than answers. Yet I always emerge from these mini pow-wows having learned something totally new. These are jewels I file away in my little brain, ready for accessing in my next relationship or just the next conversation on relationships. I’m always amazed at the new insights I gather from my friends. No matter how knowledgeable you think you are, what you know will always be limited to your own exposure and experience. It is incredibly enlightening to see things through someone else’s eyes, or with someone else’s heart.
We may never get the answers we are looking for, but we’re a few steps closer to understanding how our hearts work and love. At the very least, you and your friends get a good meal out of it.
