“I Love you. So Much. That I want to make you happy. I need to make you happy for me to even have a shot at being happy. Will you marry me?” says Ben Affleck on his knees to the love of his life in the latest flick ‘He’s Just Not That Into You.’
Are people really in love these days, or are they actually in love with the idea of being in love? Do people these days know what love is? Did people know what love was in the past? To the last question, ‘Yes,’ people in the past did know what love was. These days, some days more than others, it’s a bit lost and undiscovered.
My experience has taught me that most often we are always going after what we can’t get. If someone is too into us, we get turned off. If someone is not too into us, but is into others, then that becomes a challenge, and now we want what we don’t have. It’s the drama that we desire to be present in our lives, which without it, life would seem dull!
We grow up experiencing love through our parents first, then television, and then our peers. Before venturing off to discover it on our own. It doesn’t matter if growing up you were pampered with love from your parents, or that you grew up in a broken family, or a abusive, negative environment. Your desire to be in that love that you imagined from all the different experiences that made you who you are today is still the same.
So what happens sometimes or most of the time to people in love, looking for love, trying to discover love? VANITY happens! When you have all that you ever wanted standing in front of you, and start thinking, could there be someone better. Right then and there you are not ready for love or commitment. You have a wondering eye and mind, which is like a trojan horse, looking to be on that wild ride for either a few months, a few years or a lifetime. Vanity is a test to that road to love. If you pass it, I am pretty confident that you are on your way to discovering love, you just need your other partner to be on the same page as you, and then you are all set.
Your commitment to love is key to your happiness, your inner peace, and success in your life. If you cheat in that commitment, you are in fact cheating with yourself. Forget about for a second that you are hurting someone for a moment, and look at yourself and how you look when you break that promise to love. I realize people do have that right to change their mind or sometimes they grow out of love. So if that happens, come out and share your thoughts and feelings with your partner and talk about it like adults and keep your inner soul clean and free of all drama, because you haven’t done anything wrong. You can’t make anyone love you, or control the actions of anyone’s thoughts or feelings. It doesn’t work through manipulations, or mind games. These are just selfish tactics which for a limited time force your partner to stay in something that spiritually is not meant to be. So why are we at times afraid of doing the right thing?
We are afraid, because we don’t want to be alone. If you take away all the drama, all the excuses, the he said and she said. It comes down to that simple fact. We are all babies at the end of the day, no matter how old we get. Sometimes we lie, cheat, and do unethical things to prevent ourselves from being alone. But that does not give us the right to keep the ones we care about away from finding their love! We have to sometimes let go of things that we do not have control over. What happens when you go against the wind, you get resistance. What happens when you go with the wind, you flow like a butterfly.
Happiness is not something you learn by reading a book. Happiness is pure honesty, unselfishness, gratitude towards others, and being yourself. Not someone you saw in a magazine or movie or a music video. Being yourself is the new sexy. If someone does not see you for who you are, don’t mold yourself for that person. You should change on your own terms and through your own experiences. Molding yourself into a different person so that someone else might take notice of you, begs the question of who are you really, when all the layers come falling down?
Someone once asked me, what type of girl am I looking for? I had to think about that for a second, and then I said, “I want to be with someone that can sustain herself from the inside when all the layers that make her who she is fall away!” Love is so many things over time all bundled together that can’t be summed up to make sense to everyone. But without the foundation of love in place, with honesty, commitment, and passion. It’s all fake and complete drama and mind games!
So if you can’t commit, don’t say the ‘L’ word to someone, and if you do, make sure you mean it, because you don’t want to mess with karma.
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[Published on SouthAsianLife July 04, 2009: http://www.southasianlife.com/editors-note/commitment-to-love/]