On Sunday John and Rachel are coming down from Seattle. It's been a while, and it will be good to see them. Then S's cousin finally contacted us, and he wants to meet for dinner with his girlfriend and daughter. Eh, I'm not thrilled, but I think I'll tag along with S. Maybe she won't be like Kate Gosselin after all. We'll see.
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The following was the question of the day when I logged into my other blog last week. I didn’t have time to answer it at the time, but I e-mailed it to myself to make it a future journal entry. So here we are.
“Have you ever secretly loved someone you shouldn't have? If so, did you confess your feelings? Any regrets either way?”
I think it's hard to secretly love someone. The question seems to imply that you pine away for someone you can't have, either due to circumstances (such as they're with someone else/you're with someone else) or almost like it's a huge crush from afar where you just never gather up the courage to say something. I call that lust or intrigue, but I don't call that love. Personally I feel that love develops over time, and the other person needs to be a somewhat active participant. And if you're close to the object of your love over the months/years it takes for the love to develop, then it's not really secret, now is it? At least on some level, the other person has to know how important he/she is to you. Otherwise, why would you spend so much time with him/her?
So I guess my simplistic answer is that I've never secretly loved anyone I shouldn't have, if even for the mere fact that I don't think love is instantaneous.
If you delve a bit deeper, then you can perhaps use the loose definition of love and widen the scope to include smaller crushes. Have I ever had a crush on anyone from afar that I couldn't have? Not really. I say not really because I'm sure I found a couple of boys at least intriguing but gave up the thought for one reason or another. For example, there was one guy in high school who I liked, and we were friends, had a class together, and went to the same church. I remember we danced at Homecoming (despite coming to the dance each with different dates). He drove me home a few times. He was nice. It never went anywhere though. It's not like I stayed up thinking about him as a teenager. In fact, he only comes to mind because I saw him last month at the local grocery store. He looked exactly the same, and I wanted to go up and say hi to him and see what he's been up to. But I was afraid that he wouldn't remember me. I remembered his first and last name, the
class we had together and our teacher's name, the things we used to talk about, his sister’s name, the time we got busted at church camp, etc. I knew it probably wouldn't have gone anywhere for the long term. He was very traditional, wanted a career in law enforcement, and there were tons of little things that made us a poor match. But whenever we saw each other as teenagers at school or functions, we hung out. We just never purposely hung out.
I guess I think to truly like/love someone, you have to spend lots of quality time with him/her, and then I just don't see how it can be secret.
Thoughts?
4 comments:
I agree that you USUALLY can't call these secret, one-sided things "love." That's why I use the term "obsession" so often in my journal, and very rarely use the word "love" in reference to other people. However I do think it is sometimes possible for secret love to exist without the other person knowing. Especially if it's a best-friend type of relationship where one person secretly wishes it was more. I can think of three non-family members with whom I might use that word. With all three, it was/is one-sided and had varying amounts of secrecy involved. In fact I've been planning to write an entry on this, so I will once I finish the bulk of the Japan entries.
-Jesse
Welcome back from Japan.
I guess I could see it with best friends, but then wouldn't love be part of the relationship anyway? I don't know about you, but I tell all of my good friends that I love them, and I do. Maybe it's just different types of love?
It is an interesting question that was posed.
I find the issue of whether or not to say hi to someone because they might not remember you interesting. I do this all the time. Now that I know someone else who does it too it seems silly. What's the problem if they don't remember you? Ya know, other than feeling really awkward because they were memorable to you but obviously you weren't to them.
I'm so not memorable, Karin. People never remember me. I don't want this to be verified yet again by someone just looking at me strangely and saying, "Oh yeah...we, ugh, went to school together?" For once it'd be nice, if even just once, someone came up to me and said, "Remember me?" and I actually not remember. Just once.
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