“Me” vs “We”

Five months after I made this post, here I am back again to talk about it. Love, to be precise. Yeah, I know, not again, but it’s only fitting that this blog reflects how big of an impact love has in my life.

The truth is, I don’t think I even know what love is. I think all I’ve ever known is obsession — an unquenchable thirst for another person. I do not know what it is like to be genuinely happy for someone else, even if it means superseding my own desires. I do not know what it is like to care about someone, just as they are, without desiring to alter them to suit my own needs.

I had a fight with the Boyfriend the other day. It was a big one, the first big one we’ve had in a long while. I’ve been on Prozac for the past 7-8 weeks and it’s been working wonders on my temper, but after having swallowed back anger and hurt and frustration for months, I guess I was overdue for a rage eruption. He questioned why I insisted on keeping him by my side at every possible moment. Did I even love him as a person? If I did, why did I constantly seek to constrain his individuality?

They were tough questions, to be sure. Questions I’ve wondered to myself over and over throughout the course of our relationship.

The bottom line is, I think, that I don’t understand what it is like to want to be your own person. Personally, I don’t want to be my own person and I have no idea why anyone would want to. I don’t want to be a “me”, I want to be a “we”. I don’t want to have my own friends, or my own life. I don’t have any desires that are not completely entangled with another person. Which makes it indescribably difficult to understand when the Boyfriend expresses he has his own wants and needs outside of this relationship.

I don’t understand. I still don’t. I don’t know if I ever will.

All you want is love and belonging, and your very existence depends on it. But when you get it, you have no existence except that love; there’s still no you. — Kiera Van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline

And believe me, I want to understand, more than anything.

I just don’t.