Life and Love

I suspect this is one that people will want to skip over. It's also one of those things that I don't have the patience to bug other people about. So it's being dropped into this relatively safe space, left to float down onto the top of the pile and to be picked up by someone else whenever they so choose.

I mention love in the title, but love is a simpler thing than I think most people allow it to be. I have a twisted view of love, which to some people comes off as naive, but I don't think they see the whole. When I love someone, it is wholehearted and unfettered by anything else in my life; I love to the full capacity that I am capable of in relation to any given person at any point in time. Whether I'm in a relationship or wandering around the world alone, my affection for other human beings is unchanged. It would be naive of me to say that whoever ends up on top of my affection chart is the one that deserves my overtures and commitments.

There's a practicality to relationships that I can't escape. I have found it easy to love others more than I love the person I hold current commitments to. But that person has agreed to the relationship in a way that no one else has; I am able to be completely honest, to maintain my busy schedule and make time for interaction whenever I get the chance. I have even been able to shake the relationship down to its core, shatter its foundation and build it up anew. It takes a powerful agreement to leave that space open, to risk everything in the hope of making it better. I realize this is something that most people don't understand; if they do, they're very good at making me feel like I'm on my own here.

I've become very aware of how different my attitude towards other people is over the course of the past year. I will tell anyone anything about myself if they ask. I can love anyone for almost any reason if they request it of me. But I have a disgustingly rigid sense of morals, and once the alarm sounds, the offending individual goes into quarantine for life. Fortunately, few people have gained that kind of status in my mental prison of justice. Unfortunately, few people have asked for anything else.

On top of this, there are some ethical questions that appear to weigh more heavily in my mind than they do on average elsewhere. Can a relationship exist between professionals? More casually than that, what about a classmate that you lean on whenever possible? It's bad enough when a relationship ruins your personal life; should you give it the power to ruin your intellectual and career life as well? It was a heated topic today, and one that I remain relatively silent on. It's a case by case, in my opinion. I think I can safely say that I've only met one individual thus far that comes even close to being worth the risk. Even at that, I can see that there is no need to think of it at all. A topic better left untouched in the end, it would seem.