Tuesday, May 16, 2006 @10:29 PM
“Momma, can someone tell me what love is all about?”
I caught up with a coworker from another floor the other day. She told me that her 10-year old daughter asked her what love is.
Coworker: My 10-year-old daughter is watching a lot of TV shows now, trying to get an answer about what is love. *shaking her head*
Me: Oh dear, looks like it’s time for you to have a mother to daughter talk!!
What was I thinking when I was a 10-year-old? Perhaps this question, “What is love?” did rise in my mind around that age or later. My parents never taught me this. Neither our education system covers this subject. But I’d never asked my parents this. Not asking didn’t mean I didn’t want to know. I wanted. I still do. And I think I have already found the answer based on observation and reflection made all these years.
Incidentally while I was trash-talking with my sister, this subject was brought up. I decided to ask how she differentiates “like” and “love”. She used using Andy Lau (Hong Kong pop star) as an example.
“If you like Andy Lau, you like all his songs and will download the entire tracks for free.”
“But if you love Andy Lau, you will go and buy all his albums.”
“But of course, I’m just using Andy Lau here to distinct love and like; if you want to blog this out, please use a better-looking guy in this example.”
Her statement cracked me up. I feel so sorry for this Hong Kong pop star and his tones of fans out there. Hey, to all Andy’s fans out there that happened to read this, my sis’s just joking. : ) Okay, perhaps I should just use Mr. Darcy (my favorite character from Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’ Diary) from here onwards.
Did you get her point? I actually agree with her. All she’s trying to say is if you just like someone, you can be selfish and only want to keep him/her for yourself. But if you love the person, you’ll be selfless and treat the person’s priority as your priority. You put his/her happiness as yours, or even on top of yours. Let’s go back to my sis’s funny example; if you only like Andy, you may only like his songs, his looks or whatever. Of course if you have extra money, you won’t mind spending to shop for his record. But if you happen to have gone over your budget, you won’t be that keen in buying his record. That’s because you don’t love him, you just somehow like him. But if you really love him, you’ll want to show your support to your idol by buying his record.
What exactly is love? Nowadays many people simply banter about how they love so-and-so at the drop of a hat. Then later they say the same line to another person. Did they mean what they said to the previous person before? Or it just happened to them that they have too much “love” to give that they could afford to “love” so many people within a short period of time, one after another?!!
All along I didn’t give a clear definition to distinguish between “love” and “like”. I always assume, “like” is a milder feeling compared to “love”. You like someone because you enjoy the companionship with the person. You like someone because you’re attracted to the person (looks, personality and other factors). But to me, that affectionate feeling, that infatuation, that passion, will fade away as time goes by. Or in most cases, one day you just realize you only like one particular side of this person. Worse still, you suddenly come to realize the “good” thing about this person whom you liked before, has become “bad” thing, especially when more flaws of the person surfaced! You can only like the person to a certain extent. And usually it’s more of our own selfish reason of liking the person. See, you like this person’s ABC but not XYZ. If this person doesn’t possess ABC but only XYZ, most likely you don’t like this person anymore.
What about love? You really like this person a lot. Not only you enjoy his/her companionship and appreciate his/her good values (whatever things you’re attracted to); but you can accept his/her flaws too. You either accept his/her flaws because you understand that no one is perfect. Or better still, you are able to perceive his/her flaws as something positive. If you love the person enough, even if one day the person no longer possess the ABC you like, you’ll still love the person and want to be with him/her. You feel happy just because he/she is happy. You want to stand beside the person you love, holding his/her hands when time is tough and walking over the rough moments together. You trust the person you love and he/she just feels the same. Even if one day the person you love becomes old, wrinkly, sick, jobless, weak, poor bold and ugly, you’ll still see him/her as good-looking/beautiful. You won’t ditch him/her to go for a better one. You choose to be committed to the person you love. And it’ll only be THE one person.
I don’t think love is that complicated although it does sound murky. It certainly has no clear-cut definition about it. Affection, infatuation and passion do NOT last long; but this is when true love is revealed. You’ll just somehow know it when it happens.
