Love. It’s a word that I never used often, mostly because I didn’t know exactly what it meant. Like those who throw big words into college entrance essays to make themselves look impressive when actually they have no idea what they’ve just said and thus, in its obviousness, look stupid instead; I didn’t want that to be me. For four letters, love was a big word to me, not in length, but in power, in the connotations and the baggage attached to it. So usually I just refrained from saying it. And like wise, I never heard it much, but for my mother. She’d say it as if for some reason I had forgotten. My dad was more like myself. The word was for holiday cards and important events; on any other day it was just a given. If we both knew, why say it all the time.
Another problem; it comes in so many different forms. How do you know every time that you’re using it the right way? There is the family kind of love, the (usually) unconditional kind used for your parents and siblings, if you have them. Then there is the friend kind of love, but even that’s got different degrees involved. You’ve got the “I’d be sad if you died” kind of friendly love, the “I’d be completely lost without you” kind and the “I might as well just go with you because I’d have nothing else left” kind. Then can’t family love and friend love overlap? Some times friends are like an extension of family, and other times people have crappy families and care more about friends than anyone else; how do you define things then?
Then there is that genuine romantic love, or whatever you wish to call it, and that seems to be the most confusing of all. Half of people don’t even know what that means anyway, considering how wrong they seem to be. They say that they are madly deeply in love, but are they really? Do they just love the idea of being in love? Do they love just not being alone for once? Is it just about sex, because frankly, for some people I swear that’s all it is? Is it a kind of love that makes one feel like they want to spend the rest of their life with that person or do they just think that they’ll do for the mean time until they find a suitable upgrade? People just throw the word around like it a one size fits all kind of thing when it is obviously not and in the process it kind of loses it’s meaning.
And how exactly does one know when they are “in” love? Is it like a disease; are there symptoms? I don’t think I’ve ever been in love, I highly doubt it, but I really don’t know. Is it the kind of thing that once it’s there the light clicks on and you just know without any solid reason? All I know is that I would rather not say it and find out later that it was love all along, than to shout it from the roof tops only to find I was wrong. If it truly was love, forgetting to call it as such doesn’t change what it is. When you label something as “love” when it isn’t, everything from there on feels like it needs to mold to that idea, changing whatever it was previously to this state of pseudo-love. I would rather it just be assumed in the level and type that is most appropriate for the situation until it is shown obviously as something more or something less than that. It should just stay the same; no use poking and prodding in things beyond my complete understanding.
I have to outline this first because it is a key to answering my most frequently asked question, or at least one of the top five. People look at Finn and me and they always jump to what they feel most common place; a male and female pair of young adults, surely they just want in each other’s pants, they simply can not be content as friends. Maybe that is the case for other people, but, though Finn may have nice pants, in them, I do not want. Maybe we’re just different. I will say that I do love the kid, in the sense that life as I know it would come to a screeching halt if anything ever happened to him. He’s pretty much the constant in my life. My parents aren’t exactly the kind to which I can turn in every occasion. I have no siblings, and even if I did, he still would have come first in the timeline of my life. I’ve had other friends, but they’ve been mere transients in comparison.
So yes, there is a certain kind of love there, but the companionate dependable kind, not the terribly misguided and often dangerous kind people think exists or has at one point existed between us. At least with Finn I learned that I knew how to love someone in some form of the word in an instance where I wasn’t obligated to love them because they had that unconditional parent-child love thing going on already. Though I’ve never told him, because he’s a guy and thus probably wouldn’t understand what I meant by it, I love Finn, but I’m not in love with Finn and, in my book, that little change in wording makes a big difference.
