Love or Something Like It...

I think I am a fairly knowledgable man. I am smarter than your average bear. I have went from living in my car to leaving college with a 3.4 gpa and potential for graduate school. I have been living on my own since I was a junior in high school. My advice seems to help alot of my friends in turbulent times. That being said, I have never been in love and therefore find myself fairly devoid of essential knowledge in this particular aspect of human existence...

Perhaps I could phrase that better as I have never been in love with someone who was in love with me. I have loved a couple people that for their own reasons did not love me back in the same way and I am painfully aware that some women have loved me when I did not love them. It seems to always be a mixture of luck, bravery and timing that I will probably never master. I am aware that I do not have some essentially developed skills of making my intentions well known to parties included and it is no one's fault but my own. I have also became painfully aware of how many people in my life profess to loving me (as opposed to being in love with me) and I see now that it is an important dichotomy to realize and clarify. That being said, I am steadfast in some of my idiosyncracies. I still believe that truly getting to know someone before taking a plunge is prudent, I still believe that basing a real relationship based solely on physical attraction is begging for failure, and I still believe that deep down I could make someone happy if they had the time and patience to work with my fucked up walls I have developed.

I have to admit that after a certain amount of time being single begins to take it's toll on oneself. You begin to wonder just what it is about you that is so deterrent to other people. In other words, you begin to wonder just exactly what is fundamentally 'wrong' with yourself that you can't seem to love or inspire love with someone else. Your expressive skills in loving begin to wane after not being used for long enough. Moreover you begin to lose that trust, it begins to feel like nothing is more important than never putting yourself in a situation again where you can be hurt by showing your cards too much. To never feel that deep sharp pain of rejection. To never feel that cold awkward absence after finding out that your love was countered by an oppositional "like a friend" kind of love offered up by that significant other.

I used to be bitter about this...I used to write songs about this...I used to let this mentality run my life. I made a conscious decision to no longer let this type of thinking dictate my life. Because at the end of the day, this is it. This is life and life is finite. I could die in a multitude of fashions or freak accidents tomorrow and if I did I wouldn't want to spend my last few minutes thinking about how smugly bitter I was or how well I protected my heart from ever being hurt again. Maybe I hear my chronological life clock counting down harder than I used to, but I want to try at something again. Even if I fail I will know that I no longer stood like an awestruck bystander watching my own life progress through stages of infinite solitude. I take the same approach to love as I do to friendship; I would remove 95% of the 'friends' in my life for the 5% that truly love and understand me. I am what I am, and if it is not good enough then I really have no cause to include you in my life...that is not meant to be callous or hurtful to others but positive for myself because, no matter how I try; I will always be deeply affected by those I wish to surround myself with.

I was going to wrap this up into a neat little positivistic package and draw some attempt at a metaphorical euphimism for people to use but I have been distracted by getting into a million debates about our apparent "victory" in finally killing one man in iraq...to be continued I suppose