Saturday, March 15, 2008

Yoou make me happy!

Love. Recently been receiving much news of marriage proposals, upcoming weddings, receiving a few invitations, generally hearing all round good news. Which is great. And also a few sadder stories of other relationships being rocky, having problems, hiccups, or being on the brink of incompatibility. Also been reading John Gray’s Mars and Venus on a date. Which is a pretty good book, except for certain parts which PISSED the hell out of me, but I digress.

An often overlooked but VERY critical aspect of love, is love. Huh? Whats that, you say?

Well. I was referring to the physical act of love, of loving. To love, means being in love (the feelings) AND the verb, the physical action of loving someone. Please, Alex, make some sense.

People generally think that love is a feeling, which they cannot control. They think, they don’t choose to fall in love with someone, but they do, and that’s that. And that feeling governs their actions. So as long as they have that feeling, they are happy to do things for that person, e.g. make sacrifices, do nice things, give surprises. But once that ‘feeling’ dies, they cant do those things anymore, and they think we cannot be together already because don’t have that feeling anymore.

To a certain extent that is true. But my argument is that love is something we can control. For instance, initially, in the “sparks of romance” period, we can choose to stifle it, not respond, or, respond. There is no such thing as ‘I just fell in love with so and so, I couldn’t help it.”. Nobody suddenly falls in love. You exist. You meet someone. Over some time you realize there are sparks. So you know that if you continue, you will feed the flames, and if you continue to fan it, it will blossom into more. And if you make the decision to go for it, then you cannot claim that you just happen to fell in love.

Ok, so now you are ‘in love’, what next? Is it a matter of the feelings being some inexhaustible supply, an eternal fossil fuel, that you can reach into and inspire you to do lovely and loving things? Nope. If you dont constantly do things to feed build up maintain n nurture that well, eventually, it dries up. You need to constantly love the other person, do loving things, commit acts that require you to give, without taking, and do things purely for the simple unadulterated fact that it would make the other person happy, regardless of whether there is anything in it for you. It transcends ‘I feel something for you so I do this for you’ to also ‘by continuing to do this for you, I constantly get reminded of what a privilege this is and how happy it makes me just to see you happy and your response makes me love you more’. You might be real tired, but you stay up for that extra hour to listen to the other person, you drive the extra mile to get her that ice cream she likes, you make the effort to bring her to a place she would enjoy, things like that. Acts of giving, my friend. When you find that you can still do acts of giving, there is hope. Try it. Do something that has absolutely nothing in it for you, but gives the other joy. It works. By doing so, somehow, you end up loving that person more.

There is a scientific explanation to this, as I JUST realized from reading John Gray’s abovementioned book. In it, he says, the way guys are wired, is that we want to know that we can meet a woman’s needs and that we can make her happy. We like to feel useful and needed. So when we do things that makes her happy, the reward is not getting something in return, but that we made her happy and that we have the ability to do that. It is an intrinsic reward, quite high up Mazlow's needs traingle. It is very crucial and critical for women to let their men know that they do indeed make them happy.

You guys should be paying me for this stuff.

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