My Dear Hard Drive

Posts Tagged ‘love’

That is the tag line of a dating site I ran across a couple of days ago. I kid you not. As if the average dating sites were not full of these people already, apparently they need a site for this very purpose. It’s hard to describe what I felt when I read the site description. I don’t really worry about how wrong the site is doing by enabling cheating – in fact, they offer a great way for spouses to check up on their potentially unfaithful partners – but rather I’m thinking about cheaters again. Not how evil they are, and how much they hurt their partners, but how gutless they are. They might think they are brave and adventurous as they sneak behind their spouses backs, but in fact, they are really just scared shitless of directly confronting their wives and husbands and rather push that difficoult conversation until a later date – and gamble on the fact that they might never get caught.

These people reason, that “what they don’t know, won’t hurt them” and are smug enough to think that them staying in the lives of their spouses is better and less hurtful than hurting the feelings of their spouse by leaving them. It shows disrespect towards the partner, in terms of “you can’t find anyone as good as me, so you are lucky to have half of me” and instead of allowing their spouse to go free and find the kind of love they deserve, they sneak behind their back convincing themselves that they’re actually sparing their emotions. Even if the thought that they might be caught crosses their minds, they won’t consider their own wrong doing, but find the thought that their spouse will be forced to show their love and emotions toward them by showing the hurt they feel by the betrayal. And THAT is what is so exciting about it, even if you get caught, you get validated: “gee, my spouse still loves me even though I’m such a big shit.”

Today I read a magazine my mom has subscribed for me to keep me in touch with my Finnishness. In the magazine, Kodin Kuvalehti, there was a story of an elderly couple in their late 80′s. They were of the age group who are not all that comfortable about talking about their feelings to strangers, but the one thing that they managed to drag out of the husband was so poignant to me that it made me write this post.

He said; “The minister told me to take good care of this young woman, my wife. I have never said this to anyone, but I was overwhelmed by the huge responsibility. What if it would turn out that I could not take care of her?” We should all be rather worried about that responsibility. Not only the men, the husbands, but us wives, too. Not only financially, but also emotionally and physically. Sometimes we cannot meet the financial or physical needs of our partner, but if we can provide them with emotional support and love, it goes a long way.

Think about what he said, and what it really meant. There wasn’t a thought: “If I can’t make it, she can always divoce me.” or “She knew what she got when she married me, I am what I am…” The thought was: “What if I cannot take care of her?” The thought is full of love, respect and… Responsibility. It is the thought of someone who has joined their lives forever to love and to behold until death do us apart. Divorce doesn’t even come to it, even if it was a theoretical option. That thought comes when you understand the grandiose of your promise, and take it seriously, with respect towards your partner as well as towards the institution.

And when they asked his wife if he had taken care of her, she replied; “Oh yes he has, he has!” And then she had to dry her eye.

There are certain elements that trigger the feeling of love. Some of them are entirely natural, like the love parents feel for their offspring, even if they wouldn’t like their kids. Take my mom for example, she loves me, I know she does, but I don’t think she likes me very much. If I was someone else’s kid, she’d be saying what a horrible scatter brain I am, completely unorganized, impractical, head-in-the-clouds-dreamer, who will never amount to anything and who is very lucky to have found a man who took her as his cross to bear. I know she thinks along these lines about me, but she still loves me. I know you might wonder what that has to do with anything, but it just shows you the difference of “love” and “like”, in case you’re wondering what I’m on about.

When it comes to romantic love though, some people are excellent at manipulating it. There are even personality disorders that are based on the ability to manipulate love, namely the narcissistic personality disorder. The reason why narcissists are so dangerous is the fact that they can MAKE you love them, even if you really didn’t like the person at all. Then they make you feel like you want them to love you back, and they offer you the love you want only to take it away again, and force you to want to be validated again and again by their love for you.

The same spell is cast over you when you find that one person who you just can’t have. You don’t have to like him or her, but when he/she seems to ignore your best traits, you just want to prove that you’re worth of love. As long as they deny you their love, you’ll be coming back begging for it. It’s just a very common response to being ignored, especially if you’re not used to it. Sadly, the more admirers you have the more likely you are to fall right into this trap, because you think that if that person won’t love me, he/she must be really special, and you just have to have them.

One of the most obvious situations where you can see love manipulation is reality TV. You put 20 beautiful girls who have never heard “not interested” in their lives in the same house with a guy. Any guy would do really, as long as he’s even remotely interesting. Stick him in there, and see what happens. The girls first announce that they are not the least bit interested in this guy, and a few episodes later they are confessing their undying love for this same guy. One of the girls get the guy, being head over heels in love with the bloke but a few months later they get separated, and he starts to wonder maybe he chose the wrong girl. He didn’t, he could have picked any one of them and the result would have been much the same, unless he got really lucky.

Love is like the super glue that fixes what is broken. It fills out the blanks. It is a very useful emotion, but can be very misleading at times. Like is a lot tougher to fool. Even if you’re madly in love, you can still list a few things you really don’t like about your special someone.

They say you can’t choose who you love, but that is not entirely true. What you can do, is reprogram yourself to recognize the destructive type of love, and once you recognize it, it is a lot easier to see right through the spell. You have to ask yourself if you like this person. If you say “yes”, ask yourself what is it that you like about him or her. You will have to come up with a tangible list of qualities that you admire and appreciate about him. Not just “I like the way he walks” or “I like the way she looks at me”. Those are bullshit things to like, and you know it, don’t you? If you can say something like “I love the way he studies things. How he concentrates to find the answer.” THAT is a good thing, but not necessarily enough by itself. You’ll need more than that. How does she or he make you feel? If you say you like the way he or she makes you feel, would you say they make you feel comfortable or uneasy? Comfortable is good, uneasy is usually more pleasurable, but not good in the long run. If you feel very relaxed and comfortable, but still aware that you’re with the opposite sex, you’ve got a winner. And yes, you should feel comfortable pretty much from the get go. Unfortunately no matter how much you want that hunky guy who makes your legs feel like jelly be able to make you comfortable once you get to know him.. Nah, probably not going to happen. You can try of course, and when you give up, remember I told you so.

People often ask the question: “how do you know you’ve found love?” I have a very simple answer to it: Love is the answer, and if you are asking questions, you haven’t found it yet. If you are asking yourself questions like “Should we move in together” or “what are the pros and cons of us staying together” you know the answer isn’t love. Pros and cons are for bargaining, it means that you are giving up something, and if you feel you are giving up something, you haven’t found love, at least if you wonder if this person is worth giving something up for.

People say that when you have found love “you just know it”. That is true. You know it, because all questions stop popping into your head. There’s no more “does he/she really love me back?” any more than “do I really love him/her?” going around in your head. All that is left is just a calm knowledge that all is well and how it should be.

Are your friends and family telling you that you need a man or woman to take care of you? Why are they saying that? Can’t you hack it alone? The sad thing is that the time that you are the weakest and lowest in your own life is not the time to start a new relationship. I recently got a virus attack on my computer. Soon after I got an automatic announcement that I should install this anti-virus software that would solve all my problems. I didn’t install it, because I suspected it was software that was pretending to be my friend when my computer was in crisis. You should be equally aware of these real life Trojan horses, people who come into your life when you are weak and desperately in need of a friend. They come in with all the solutions only to eat you up inside later on.

The thing with some people is that they actually do want to be your friend and your savior. That is why they come to those in need. But once you gain strength they will need to make you feel worthless again, as they are afraid you wouldn’t need them anymore if you could handle things for yourself. That is why these people are the biggest real danger you will face in your romantic life, online and offline, not so much the serial killing psychopaths, but these people, that the medical world knows as narcissists.

People who tell you you should learn to love yourself before you can be loved by someone else are absolutely right. You need to know what kind of behavior you are willing to accept from a partner and be assured of the fact that you deserve to be treated with respect in all situations possible. I’ll go into more detail about this later on, but consider this now; Are you strong enough to know love?

Sometimes, when we get involved with a person, we kind of hold back our feelings waiting to get some sort of an assurance of their feelings toward us. It is often a question of poor self-esteem, when we kind of think that if SOMEONE would love me, I would so love them! Along those lines. I used to think that way when I was a lot younger, until I was in a relationship in which my boyfriend clearly loved me, and I tried, I tried to love him but I couldn’t get further than liking him. So I decided that I would never ever start dating again unless I wasn’t really expecting great things. I would not string anyone along any more, I would survive being rejected, but I could not watch another man cry for me, never again.

This attitude gave me the freedom of expressing my interest to those I was interested in, smiling freely, telling them I liked them. Who cares if they don’t like me or love me? More often than not, they liked me too, some loved me. It still was, until I found my husband, that there was something else not working, that led into a break up, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like them, or that they didn’t like me. I have never had to look back and think: “What on earth did I ever see in that man?” because my feelings were always based on their personality and appearance rather than the hope of them loving me in return.

There has been a study that showed, that people are more likely to find you attractive if you express interest towards them. If you tell them you like them, or even if someone else tells them that this person likes you. You start paying more attention to that person, because, there’s a possibility of returned love if you give your love away. Attractive thought, isn’t it? While I wouldn’t disregard the power of receiving attention, I still would look into the person with a critical eye. Why would you love them? If they didn’t like you, would you still like them? Would you be even remotely interested?

There’s another good reason to try not to fall in love with the possibility of receiving love. Love hungry people are the prime target of people with narcissistic personality disorder. They can give you love, show you love, and then deny their love just to push your buttons like you were a lab rat. You will be running after that love, not their personality, as that personality is really not that lovable. They will LOVE to prove that they love you, (even if they really didn’t) while normal people get quite tired in proving their love for you eventually. It’s just not worth it, who ever you are.

What I want to say with all this, is that get to know yourself. Learn to love yourself, and then put that twinkle in your eye and let people you love know that you love them. You don’t have to go around saying it, but giving them a warm happy smile will be just enough in most cases. Who cares if they reject you? That doesn’t change who you are and what you are worth. You are not looking for love, you are looking for true love, am I right?