[25] Love, Keep The Change.

An Op-Ed exploring love through change — the third article in my [ ON LOVE ] series.

Love is not merely bartering the charm you have to offer. Love is not merely a best friend to whom you’re attracted. Love is not merely the vulnerable truth on a platter. Love is not merely the cozy warmth during, the nervous shivers before, or the heartbreak thereafter. Love, when you strip it down and skin it clean, is sacrifice — the sacrifice of time, of effort, of instinct. 

But of course, love is not merely the sacrifice of these things. Perhaps it’s more apt to view sacrifice as a prerequisite to love, or a promise during love, or a perpetuation of love. And of the wide array of sacrifices one could make, the sacrifice most aligned to love is the sacrifice of one’s identity for the someone you love.

1 TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE CH- CH- CHANGES

If someone I didn’t love asked me to change for them (say, they didn’t like how I ranted about movies — if so, fuck you?), I’d respect them by changing an aspect of our relationship as to better accommodate our conflicting likes and dislikes. But it’s nigh never that I’d fundamentally reconstruct my innate behavior and internalized beliefs for their sake. Make no mistake, the sacrifice here is of circumstance, not of identity —you and I may not rant about movies anymore, but I’ll just find someone else to rant about movies to.  

That’s because change is a tall ask. Everyone thinks they themselves are the first option for their team — and, honestly Coach, I don’t blame them. Coach, what the hell were you expecting when you asked our (self-proclaimed) superstar to to swtich up their game (is my playmaking not good enough for you?), to pass the ball more (do you not trust in my shooting?), and to sacrifice individual stats for team synergy (you expect me to make myself less of what makes me, me?). Let the ball handler handle the ball instead of castrating him of what he does best. 

But, in love? Even in the case that the change is something that I pride about myself, if at the request of someone I love, I’d change for them — not merely to appease this someone I love, but because I have faith in their judgment that this change truly is in my best interest (look, if it worked for the 2014 Spurs where not a single player on their roster averaged above 20 points but they still won the championship, maybe that’s proof enough that this self-suppressive, trust-in-others level of change does indeed work). 

2 WILD, WILD HORSES

I hear the galloping. Four horsemen challenge this notion of love.

And a one… what about the loves that don’t need change? As a nature photographer who is compelled not to interact with the wild animals, you may feel compelled to preserve the love you share with someone else by letting what’s bad remain untouched as much as you’d let the good remain untouched. This preservation of love seems akin to authenticity — you believe the only way to value someone is to love them when you let them fully be themselves. Does it not stand to reason that, much in the same way you expect yourself to be authentic, you would want the same from your loved one? Would it not be a shame if you, in hopes of changing the love, ruined this harmonious habitat that’s been simmered and sautéd through glitz and grit? 

But hold your horses, because here’s where I’ll strain the naivete out of you. It’s sour to know you don’t (and won’t) ever understand someone as well as you understand yourself. It’s shrewd to know any given relationship is undergoing change at any given point. It’s savory to know an alteration to an arrangement is only awkward if you amend it as such. And to your point of contention that a love might not need change? You would deny a cherished dish from reaching its potential because you’re content with how you’ve made this dish thus far?

A two… what’s your type? Blasphemy, because such questions miss the mark entirely on what mate matching is meant to be. The rate-determining step of your love should not be your desire to love, but a series of elementary steps where the intermediate fondness for someone has already been produced — in layman’s, you’re missing the mark entirely on what love is if you’re either (1) seeking or (2) scouting. 

To seek to be in love runs the risk of you looking for someone good enough. That’s not love, shit, that’s not even lust — because the lustful are at least honest with themselves. What you want is not a partner, but a means to escape the lonely burden of having to take care of yourself. 

To scout a lover runs the risk of you not understanding who is good for you. You set prerequisites (perhaps even based on lived experience) that you couldn’t possibly live without because the valuable traits of your partner will, in turn, make you feel valuable. But in your resume-fication of others, you choose to faux fondness — because, in part, a bond is about looking past the dingy, dirty bits of others, because whatever hell else they bring to the potluck is so damn delectable. Seek and scout, and you’ll never truly know what’s good for you. 

A three…  tell me, is this love? The love I felt towards someone when I was ten was a more simplified version of how I would describe love today — perhaps I wouldn’t even consider it as love today. But, back then, I meant it when I lauded my loves. In the same way, I feel so certain about what love means to me today, but come tomorrow, who’s to say what further I learn about love in the context of people, parents, peers, pairs won’t demand another dictionary update? Who’s to say the people I love today won’t be classified as people I love tomorrow, not because I love them less, but because my criteria for love have grown more complex? Does anyone, then, ever achieve love? Well, yes — I have loved once, and so I will love again.

A four!… what will make me want to love? I don’t remember how I met my loved ones. I couldn’t make up a timeline of instructions on how I got to befriend and bond with these people. And so, it’s been hard to pinpoint what I bring to the aforementioned metaphorical potluck that’s intriguing to some (but not intriguing to others). And now that I’m at this campus that houses more strangers than colleagues (and perhaps that’ll be the case for the rest of my tenure here), I’ve had to grapple with how I pitch myself. 

This horseman knows I’ve pitched and pitched, yet any semblance of love still feels so far. But alas, maybe all love needs is for you to offer something to someone, and then be offered something back — it’s obvious that different loves of mine have offered me different things, but I suppose I never considered that what I have to offer isn’t always the same. To be honest, this doesn’t alleviate my concerns on how I pitch myself — I’d hate if my pitch of choice fails to garner a bond that could become love, but I’d hate it even more if (in the search for a bond capable of forging love) I fail to depict who I truly am. It’s bad if a pitch is so gentrified (out of fear not to make a bad impression) that you end up not making an impression at all. It’s bad if a pitch is so generic that you become too tolerant with whom you think you can learn to love. I’d say your pitch should be a gentile invitation — for there’s no pressure to talk, but we’re both here anyways, so we might as well meet someone new (me in you, and you in me).

3 HEDGEHOG’S DILEMMA

For a while, treating others the way I wanted to be treated was a privilege I granted to frequent a fellow. It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to be treated in a certain way — but rather that I knew firsthand how heartwarming it was to be treated with intention, and so it’d be remiss of me if I couldn’t provide that privilege to the people I care about. For a while, I was ok (if anything, I felt obligated) to be the friend who loved you more than you loved me. 

And yet, love gets lost in translation. My capability to cultivate a love for a vast roster of people was bound to come with the caveat of inevitable incompatibility — the jack can only have so many trades, and not everyone I’ve loved desired my services. Perhaps receiving my love wasn’t enough, wasn’t sought-after. What this jack has to offer may, at first, offset what he can’t offer — but after a while, it gets to a point and you’d rather find another jack. Perhaps you need to treat people the way they want to be treated, and if you can’t, then the love must be left behind. It messes with me when a love sputters away or shatters asunder, because it’s a reminder that, though I can learn to love anyone, I can’t always keep that love aflame. 

So, love might not be in the air, but maybe that’s alright. Yeah, if anything, I think setting a higher barrier to entry to want to love someone might be a good thing. To keep a distance between yourself and others, and to acknowledge there is as much risk as there is privilege to get closer with someone — part of the risk being that you never know which flaws you would rather not have known about the other party, but most of the risk being that you can’t take a step back after having gotten closer without at least one party being hurt. 

The hedgehog’s dilemma — “hedgehogs have a hard time sharing warmth with other hedgehogs. The closer they get, the more they hurt each other with their quills” — doesn’t scare me, but I think that’s only because I still have the select few whom I can depend on for love when shit gets tough. I’ve become ok with being alone, or at least that’s what I tell myself. I certainly don’t like what my indifference to being alone entails for me — that I could, if I wanted to, be a social person, but that I’m merely choosing not to be in favor of my other needs.  I suppose I still don’t like being alone (and I especially don’t like being reminded that I’m alone), but my priorities after graduation have changed what I seek from my life. 

4 CHOATE

Choate, man. I left senior year learning to come to terms that so many loves of mine went wilted. I knew some of it was my fault, but I couldn’t shake off the semblance of spite. But then I see the things and trinkets in my bedroom back in Busan that once resided in each of my four Choate dorm rooms that I don’t have space in my luggage to bring to Cornell and I’m sad about how many memories I feel I’ve forced myself to forget in order to move on. 

The “I hope I’ve given you as much value as you’ve given me” is a privilege that I wanted to give to others. And goddamnit, I’m sentimental, so it’s a privilege I’d have loved to have been able to grant once more. I look at the love I’d once harbored for lost loves with gratitude, yet even that gratitude seems as if it isn’t reciprocated. 

It stands to reason that all I wanted from my senior year was to resolve everything before I left. To still the stormy seas, to please the plunder. I didn’t need to be drunk in port narrow love with these landlubbers again — look, matey, even Blackbeard knows that ship has sailed. On Sir Francis’ fleet I don’t even know if I would want to set sail on that ship. But I do know for certain I wanted to feel comfortable saying aye to the men who were once my crewmates, knowing they’d say aye back. 

I’ve fought for love, to the extent that I’ve been hurt to see that you didn’t fight for it nearly as hard as I did. But, time and time again, I’ve learned that this “fight” (often manifesting itself through confrontations), was in vain. Because, more often than not, what you wanted the relationship to be simply wasn’t what I wanted from it. What you could give me would not satisfy me, and vice versa. My confrontations were meant to be a sneak peek into my thoughts — to ask you to help me keep the friendship alive despite the rocky road it tread. But maybe these confrontations, as well-communicated as they were, were more preoccupied with trying to convince you to act in accordance with my own outlook on love — and my suffocating justification was that such an outlook is how I learned to love you, and so you’d be lagging if you didn’t show such a love back.

I’ve since ceased production on my patented confrontations — partly because it’s pointless and partly because it’s wholly on me whether or not I’m offended by something. I’ve stripped others of the expectations I hold for them because I shouldn’t expect you to be perfect for me, but it’s also been a means to reclaim some sort of agency over our dynamic. After all, relationships are a two-way street, and if I feel that you’re not putting in the effort, you can’t possibly expect me to give you my all. 

5 THOSE FUCK ASS BUTTER COOKIE TIN CONTAINERS YOUR GRANDMA WOULD FILL WITH SEWING PINS 

I would love to love again. It’s in the context of college that I find it’s not quite as simple as finding someone to love — “dating for the experience” and “dating to marry” both falter to fallacy. The former subtly prevents love from blossoming by treating the time spent with another (and everything in between) as just another dataset amongst many to come, whereas the latter parries the responsibility of conflict by giving up as soon as shit gets tough because it relates the longevity of a relationship to conjecture instead of cooperation. 

It’s not necessarily a middle ground, but perhaps you should “date for the flair.” The first few days of orientation made me believe I was bad at small talk, but I now reconfirm that I’m just a judgmental asshole who has a hard time finding things genuinely impressive, genuinely interesting. Things get tricky when you’re engaged in small talk with a Royal Dansk blue tin of a girl but she’s full of sewing silk instead of butter cookies — sure, you’re attracted to her (and so you fight for the conversation through your nervousness because, damn, her eyes are pretty) but the small talk’s not going anywhere because what the FUCK are you supposed to talk about, when all there is is silk? And so, figure out the flair first. Meet people when the circumstances allow them to, and hope that you get to know one another well enough that you share a flair or two, and then hope that your flair is feisty enough to get you a date (and that her flair makes you want to go on that date). Love ia not as a feeling, but is an action — to change your dynamic with people as the circumstances change. 

I muster up these musings because I’m scared — scared that, given my newfound perception of love, I won’t be able to find love (both out of logistics and out of stubbornness, the latter of which is mine to blame). But I have loved before (and loved hard, I did), and it’s only true that I’ll love again — and when I do, I hope that what I’ve learned about love will ensure it’s a love that’ll last. Aha, I come back to you, fourth horseman! You ask of me what I have to offer for love. To the next person I love, I offer them my willingness to bend my priorities and to bend myself for them (with the intention of me making time for them), and that they’d make all the bends in time for me.