'Love' is the hardest word, not 'sorry'

My lovely housemate Denise is back - hoorah! No more loneliness for me.....though thanks to all the people who have kept me sane over the holidays through e-mails, phone calls and messenger. Denise can now take over - bet she's excited! In further news, my equally lovely friend Shaw has booked her flights over here in March, so I have that to look forward to as well. I am becoming a holiday whore - not good for the bank balance.

Last night, leading on from previous conversations with Dan about emotions and being ruthless*, a thought - should I be more so? Would it benefit me in any way to be less feeling, and more determined? More ruthlessness might be helpful, in that it would allow me to get rid of some of the 'dead wood' that currently floats through my life. But then at some points in time, when I probably should have been ruthless with relationships and cut myself off from hurtful situations, I relented and went for the friendly, accepting approach. Has this gained me more friends, because people know that they can trust me and depend on me? Or has it gained me less respect, because people think that they can screw me over and I will probably still be friends with them? It's hard to tell. I think there is probably a little of both in there. But all I can say is, I have a lot of friends. I guess occasionally I'll get taken advantage of, but I just don't think being ruthless is for me.

Another late night thought was on the subject of loving vs being in love. Only for me to get up this morning and find that someone has beaten me to it via a comment on Butterscotch's blog! In theory I am in agreement with the commenter, James, who says that he would rather love somebody than be in love, given the choice. This is logical, but it does not stop us from wanting more.

The problem with love, as I see it, is that people are scared of it. If someone gave you a piece of paper, and asked you to write names down in two columns - people you have loved, and people you have been in love with - there should be quite a few names in the first column, and maybe a couple in the second. And then if you were to tick the names that you have said "I love you" to, how many ticks would there be? I hazard a guess that there would be very few. The trouble arises because the phrase "I love you" has become an indication of something other than just love. It seems to be taken as a commitment, or as something extremely scary. And yet there are all these people in the first column of your list, people who you love; parents, relations, friends of both sexes - and you never tell them so (possibly parents excepted). If you were to do so, they would think you were slightly odd, and your friends might start freaking out if you suddenly declared you loved them. I can't help feel that this is a sad state of affairs. If I love my friends, it is because I care a lot about them, I appreciate their friendship, and I would do everything I could to help and support them. I don't feel that it should be bad to tell them this. But because I hold to convention, and because I know that my male friends especially would run for the hills screaming if I said I loved them, I haven't told them that I do.

Is this partly because the phrase "I love you", if used commonly and by a large number of types of people, would lose its uniqueness? Perhaps hoping that the person you are in love with will one day say those words to you would not hold as much magic as it does now if everyone said them to everyone else. Or maybe there would just be more love and affection in the world, and more people who knew that they were special to someone. Who knows. But in the meantime, I guess we have to continue not telling people we love that we love them. However, after the recent events in Asia, I think it's pretty important that people that you love (or are in love with) know you love them (or are in love with them) before sometime happens to disrupt your plans to tell them "one of these days." I'm not going to list the people I love, since there'll always be someone who feel uncomfortable with this, or someone who thinks I am hitting on their girl/boyfriend. So I shall content myself with saying; to all my friends, my family, and the people who are dear to me, I love you. And I'll tell you that to your face, if you let me!


* Which as I discovered when I looked it up in curiosity, is not connected to the biblical Ruth, but rather comes from the verb rue 'to feel sorrow or pity [about]', from Old English, and the noun suffix -th, which forms nouns of action (birth) or abstract nouns denoting quality or condition.