ubunja:
Ubunja, a pleasure to meet you online.
see how your last line contradicts your first line.
Let me unravel my reasoning. I am one of those people who derails the reader when I try to be concise, when I should rather to take the time to explain.
In love everyone is invested. Whether emotionally, financially or whatever. Love is always an investment. Even God Himself is invested emotionally in loving mankind. If you love someone you're invested.
Maybe my position is better stated as "not all love is a direct investment in another". There is altruistic action, service, and hope without expectation. There is love for a country, love for a cause, familial love, charitable love. Motivation for those can be from a sense of duty, justice, faith, or some other sense of what is right. A person might be emotionally invested in those ideals, and express that investment to those ideals, in their actions toward another person. Which on the outside, might look like a love relationship with that person.
If someone says to you "I love you". Then you reply "prove it". That thing he/she will do to show you their love is what they've invested in loving you. If love can't be proven then it's fake, nonexistent and theoretical and you're better off without it. Hm, how do you prove love, and what sort of person demands proof in the first place? If you have stood by another through thick and thin for seven years, with hard work building your shared dream, given financial assistance to their aspirations, encouraging words, service, patience, and sacrifice, and are then asked to prove your love, what should be your response?
But you guys try to complicate love and go against basic principles even a grade 1 pupil knows that's why you end up running around in circles contradicting yourselves. Love might not be complicated, but talking about it, and how to define it, can be. 
Im really surprised you people are having problems with this most basic of love principles. How then will you survive in today's increasingly brutal romantic landscape?? No wonder you guys are killing yourselves left right and centre because of love. You really don't understand what you're dealing with.
Ubunja, I have had sore experience on the wrong end of the love principles you are talking about--from being the more invested partner in relationships where I expected reciprocation, and giving my all, and hurting like hell afterward. I completely understand the concept of being more hurt, the more one is invested, and having expectations. I don't think I have it in me, to go through that yet again. My way of coping, to save myself that turmoil without renouncing love, is to experiment with love for principles instead. That if someone is friendless, be their friend. If they need to pour their heart out, listen. If they lack confidence, build them up. If they've lost their way in life, help them find it. I hope that their situation improves for my efforts, but I am not emotionally attached the outcome. I offer sympathy, compassion, and different approaches to problems, and then I let go. I keep my emotional investment in the principle of altruism which won't betray me, and not in the person. The person is the proxy for, and the beneficiary of, my love.
I don't know if this is also what LordKO had in mind, we will have to ask him, but this is what I saw immediately, when I read what he had to say. |
