Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Love Is A Tricky Thing

“You can’t help who you fall in love with”.

Can’t you?

A friend of mine would vehemently argue that the above statement is total bullshit and a whole load of crap.

He and I had this discussion before about why people have affairs even though they’re married. In my opinion, people have affairs because they feel that there is a void in the marriage. They’re not getting what they need in the marriage, hence the need to look for it somewhere else. I told him that is certainly not an excuse but somehow that is the reason given by people who have affairs.

He said that you CAN help who you fall in love with if you know where the lines are. Then you know not to cross it. He said you should always, always avoid making a “connection” be it physical or emotional with people who are engaged or married. He said you should even avoid people who have gfs or bfs. I told him it’s easier said than done. You watch all these movies about married people who found their so-called soulmates AFTER they’ve been married to other people. Somehow movies made it easier to just follow your heart and leave your existing partner and go make a life with your soulmate. Once in a while they do make movies about how tough life is for children of the divorced couple but it always have a happy ending. The children in those movies ALWAYS end up understanding why their parents got divorced, believing that they are not the cause of the divorce and ended up being friends with their stepmoms and stepdads.

Is that always the case in real life?

My friend believed that you can be happy just being single. You do not need to create unnecessary drama in your life just to spice things up. I told him usually the dramas are created by people who are in a relationship. He just laughed. Think about it. Why the need to seek for attention somewhere else when you can get that from your wife/husband/fiancée/gf/bf? In this day and age, sex before marriage is so common that people starts to hump each other even after the first date! I’m not here to judge. I’m just saying that’s the reality of life today. So if you can get your sexual needs satisfied by your partner, why the need to seek “attention” somewhere else? But then again it's not always about sex, is it?

Say the sex was bad, for example. Is it wrong to communicate and tell your partner that the sex was bad? I mean, you love your partner, right? If you love your partner, wouldn’t you want to make them happy? Yes, they may not be thrilled to hear you tell them that sex was bad and that they need to improve but deep down I’m sure they would at least try to make it good, right? How big of an ego can one person have that they would get totally offended and ask for a break-up just because you were being honest with them?

You hear about married people having affairs almost everyday. I don’t blame people who’d rather stay single for the rest of their life. How tight a leash can you have on your husband/wife anyway? For a woman, you can invoke fear in your husband by telling them you’ll cut their balls off if you ever found out they are fooling around with other women but would you actually do it? You think your husband believe that you’d actually cut their balls off? At the end of the day, when your husband come back home and tell you he wants out of the marriage because he had found someone else more loving or more pretty or more sexy or a better cook than you, what else can you do? Beg him to stay? Tell him you’d be a better wife in the future? Blame yourself for his indiscretions? Or would you take that knife and cut his balls off?

It’s true. You CAN’T help who you fall in love with. But you can draw the line on who you should or should not get closed to and promise not to cross that line no matter what. I found this quote in one of the articles on the internet, “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new…, all the time, made new…”

No matter how much time you spend trying to make perfect bread, if the other person is sick and tired of eating your bread then it’s pointless, isn’t it?