Relationship

“To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.” – Kierkegaard.

              I believe that when having interpersonal relationship with anybody we must have love as the very primary factor. If one wishes to be a lover he must start saying ‘YES’ to love.

           Loving means people interacting, getting through the extremes. The most human thing we have to do in life is to speak our honest convictions and feelings and live with the consequences. This is the first requirement of having relationships, and it makes us vulnerable to other people who may ridicule us. But our vulnerability is the only thing we can give to other people. When love is truly responsible, it is one’s duty to love all men. Loving all men is having interpersonal relationship.

          If we are going to be “loving” together, It’s important that you know that I am in a “love bag”, and I’m not ashamed of it. We are in a time in our society when we’re really beginning to look at what life is all about, what is learning, and what are the processes of change. We’re becoming acquainted with a new nomenclature. We’re looking a “conditioning,” we’re looking at “behavior shaping and modification,” reinforcement, that is necessary to reinforce, that what is reinforced will probably affect behavior. We are using all kinds of things to reinforce. We’re using money, we’re using bells, we’re using electric shocks. We’re even using candy. M & M’s have become a big thing, and when somebody gives the correct response, we pop an M & M into his mouth.

          I have a message for you today, it is simply that the best M & M in the world is a warm, pulsating, non-melting human being – YOU! Real love is a very human phenomenon.

           Love is a learned phenomenon, and I think the sociologists, the anthropologists, and the psychologists, will tell us with no hesitation. What worries me is that maybe many of us are not happy with the way we’ve learned it. As experienced human beings we must certainly believe in one thing more than anything else – we believe in change. And so, if you don’t like where you’re at in terms of love, you can change it, you can create a new scene. You can only give away what you have. That’s the miracle. If you have love, you can give it. If you don’t have it, you don’t have it to give. Actually it’s not really even a matter of giving, is it? It’s a matter of sharing. Whatever I have I can share with you; I don’t lose it because I still have it. It is possible for me – and not unreasonable – to love everyone with equal intensity and still have all the love energy I ever had.

There are a lot of miracles to being a human being, but this is one of the greatest miracles. Having myself committed as a lover makes many changes. Man is constant to change, to deny change is to deny reality. Attitudes change, feelings change, desires change, especially love changes. Thus, having relationships bring change. There is no stopping it, no holding it back; there is only going with it. Just like a river; always itself, yet ever changing, recognizing no obstacle. So maintaining or breaking it depends mostly to us. But men are prospective friends and lovers; we can have inter human relationship of whatever kind. We are susceptible for having interactions. Nothing is irreversible, that’s why what is done is done. Even the seemingly most insignificant thing can bring us closer to ourselves and therefore to others.

          Timothy Leary says, “Man has a pretty static picture of the world, accidentally or forcibly imprinted upon him by means of chains of conditioned associates. Man believes his imprint board is reality.” The persons who know us always structure the changes. They usually judge. My relationship with others is always questioned, suspected, labeled. Sometimes, the pressure of what they expect of you puts you in deep water. It is basic to know that the expectations that one can live his life are considered complicated by our associates.

          For only a deep relationship offers ” the adventure of uncovering the depth of our love, the height of our humanity. It means risking ourselves physically and emotionally; leaving old habit patterns and developing new ones; being able to express our desires fully, while sensitive to the needs of the other; being aware that each changes at his own rate, and unafraid to ask for help when needed.” Lovers are determined to use their united energies in helping each other through the endless process of discovering who they really are, then revel forever in this continually changing knowledge and discovery. It is only in this way that human love can flourish.

          A relationship suggests to man the most extreme of responsibilities. It implies a burden, a restriction to his freedom, seldom the converse. I’ve always been afraid of a deep relationship because of the responsibility it seemed to impose. I was afraid of the demands it would make of me and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to meet those demands. I was amazed to find that when I did get the courage to form a relationship, I actually became stronger.

          I acquired two minds instead of one, four hands, four arms, four legs, and another’s world. In joining forces to someone, I got twice the strength to grow, with twice as many alternatives. Now, it’s easier for me to love others. I am stronger and less afraid. Romantic love is more colorful and full of magic… but magic rhymes with tragic, it has happiness and anger, pride and jealousy, illusion and reality, beauty and madness. The irony of all ironies. In relationships, lovers growing hand in hand… but separately.

          Separately, because it’s impossible to expect that two individuals, even in love, will grow at the same rate and in the same direction. This means that one may not totally understand or appreciate another’s growth or its resultant behavior. But love helps us to accept the fact that other individual is behaving only as he is able to behave at the moment. To ask that he act otherwise is to ask the impossible. If two people grow apart in love, it is usually due to the fact that one or the other refuses to grow or change.

          In this case, a lover can either decide to adjust to the behavior, ignore it or, after all else seems useless, move away from it, and leave. Many are asking me the question, “is ‘moving away’ really love?” indeed, it is. For if a lover stands in the way of another then he is no longer loving. In the deepest sense, we all have a core of humanness. The greatest thing a man can be is a human being with the strengths and the frailties implied in the meaning.

           It takes a lot of courage to let go, they say the art of moving away is the most painful thing ever when you are living. We are living our separate lives now and I wouldn’t want to destroy the lives we are starting to live once more. Many times I’ve loved, but I do not get tired of it. For in loving I am living. Being in pain is loving, so when I’m hurt and down all-over, I do find myself happy for I know I’m a human being who can love in the real sense. As one shows others he loves them, so must he reveal to them his need for love.

          You cannot assume that people, even those most close to you, will know and understand your unexpressed needs and feelings. If you want people to know you, you are responsible for communicating yourself to them. That is why I am expressing myself in the way that I know… be true of what you really want in life and live your life with others as if you will never live this day like any other ordinary day just as the popular saying goes, “to live each moment as if it is the last day of your life.”

           To be a lover, it requires strength, for to be a lover will require that you continually have the subtlety of the very wise, the flexibility of the child, the sensitivity of the artist, the understanding of the philosopher, the acceptance of the saint, the tolerance of the dedicated, the knowledge of the scholar, and the fortitude of the certain. A tall order! All of these qualities will grow in him who chooses love for these are already a part of his potential and will be realized through loving. It becomes, then, a matter of loving your way to interpersonal relationship. Do we love only when one is present to us? Is being present a factor needed for having interactions with one another? Does being present mean being visible? God is not biologically present … but His mysterious works are the ones signifying that He exists as our supreme creator. God fills the world with blessings that touch our lives in countless different ways- the beauty that we see, the joys that warm us, the dreams that bring real purpose to our days… too wonderful, to dear for words to tell, and He gives them to us freely, asking only that we take them to our hearts and love them well. Mastering the art of living comes from a sure trust in the goodness and meaning in each of us and a strong faith that we can build our own lives- it may not come swiftly or smoothly or easily, but in this inner creation lies the greatest triumph of all, the realization of all that we were born to be. It is His will to be done on heaven and earth. It is this that I am surrendering myself in what He wants me to be and be who I have to be according to what my heart dictates which is to love all men.

        Loving all men is the same as loving each man. Kierkegaard is one of the chief proponents of this idea. He says, “It is, in fact, Christian love which discovers and knows that one’s neighbor exists and that… it is one and the same thing… everyone is one’s neighbor. If it were not a duty to love, then, there would be no concept of neighbor at all. But only when one loves his neighbor, only then is the selfishness of preferential love rooted out and the equality of the eternal preserved.”

            Man has no choice but to accept this duty, for when he does not, he finds his alternatives lie in loneliness, destruction and despair. Herbert Otto states: “only in a continuing relationship is there a possibility for love to become deeper and fuller so that it envelops all of our life and extends into the community.” I love my friends, my friends’ friends, teachers, my family, my acquaintances, the world and my God.

          I do love them all. I would never get tired of sharing myself to others, I would not refuse taking risks, I would always tolerate pains… for loving is not to be judged, conditioned and criticized. Love is prejudicial, superstitious, unscientific bosh. “… and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love.

          There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” Everything I had mentioned contributes to my very personality… I am whom you know who I am because of every single humanness that is brought out by all my interpersonal relationships.. It is my potential, hidden when I was born.

             By continuing to socialize with my fellow beings I am more of me. A London psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, in his book, The Politics of Experience, suggests something very provoking – something alien and rather frightening, yet a wondrous challenge. He says, “what we think is less than what we know: What we know is less than what we love: and what we love is so much less than what there is; and to precise extent, we are much less than what we are.”

         Isn’t that a mind blower? It seems to me that in the past we have not sufficiently celebrated the wonderful uniqueness of every individual. I would agree that personality is the sum total of all the experiences we have known since the moment of conception to this point in our life along with heredity. But what is often ignored is an X factor. Something within the you of you that is different from every single human being, that will determine how will you project in this world, how will you see this world, how will you become a special human being.

          That uniqueness is what worries me because it seems to me that we’re dropping it; we’re losing it. We’re not stressing it; we’re not persuading people to discover it and develop it. I am often inspired by, “I love because I must, because I will it. I love for myself, not for others. I love for the joy it gives me – and incidentally, only – for the joy it gives to others. If they reinforce me it will be good. If they do not, it will be good, for I will to love.”