Why Are You Two Together, or Relationship 2.0

Tell me honestly, how often have you asked yourself this question — why are you together with your husband, partner, boyfriend?

My mother used to repeat the words of one dean of the institute, who claimed that in life, a woman should have only one major — to marry successfully. To be frank, I never liked that expression. Moreover, it irritated me.

Successful marriage is a relative concept. After all, it implies something different for everyone: someone needs a big living space and the desire to move out from their parents as soon as possible, someone simply wishes for a rich husband, and someone requires care and attention.

Although, each person needs care and attention. In fact, can a marriage be successful at all? Being lucky in a relationship — what does it signify anyway? Relationships are not poker to wait for a lucky hand. This is primarily work. Everyday painstaking work, which is not always crowned with success. Searching for a husband??? Why? Don’t you think it should happen naturally? As a rule, we don’t contemplate about it. And if we do, then the answer to “why are we together” is either “fate tied us” or “because we love each other”. These are the answers for the “average” domokhozis, of course. I would like to hear something different from the “high-flying” domokhozis.

It may sound strange, but even the “we love each other” explanation is not enough. Although, it would seem, what could be more important than love in a relationship? In relationship 2.0, love comes first. Yet not to someone, but to yourself in the first place. We constantly confuse self-love with selfishness, and many have not figured it out. However, those who figured it out reached a new qualitative level. A person who truly loves himself is essentially a self-sufficient person. He is confident in himself, in his abilities, in the righteousness of his decisions.

Furthermore, love for another person is a completely natural feeling. Nonetheless, this love is different. Not love as a necessity, but rather as freedom. “I need you I want you” is a good thing, but only for about two weeks (okay, okay, let it be for a couple of months), and love in the form of freedom is for eternity. Nobody belongs to anyone, because any belonging is an addiction.

Have you ever tried to love freely? In a sense that you let yourself fly and let your loved one fly too? You fly together and separately. You are flying south together, however, separately you are also flying south… This, of course, is an unattainable peak for many. Unfortunately, there are too many conventions that prevent you from flying high. It happens that   one wants to do it, but the other does not let them. It also happens that one may already possess wings, while the other has not grown them   yet. It even happens that one foolishly offers his wings to another, and subsequently starts to crawl instead of flying. It’s different every time…

I remember how I told my husband “I love you” 17 years ago. I  remember where we were… The way we were sitting… Why did I tell him this after literally two weeks of being close? Because, as my friend Igor Sorin used to say, “everything in life is an emotion”. Have I thought  about how these words would affect our relationship, or what they meant at that moment for him, my young boyfriend? I was torn to pieces, so I froze. Indeed, what did I feel at that moment? I felt the emotion that he was giving me, and I was grateful to him for that. At that time, I could only express this emotion with the phrase “I love you”. How deeply did I feel this love? Frankly, I didn’t feel it at all. I was selfish at this instance. I was “out of it”, so I expressed myself. Did I think about my young boyfriend at that moment and his feelings? Nope. I was only interested in mine. And he, poor fella, was taken aback. He replied honestly: “I like you very much.” Well done, Andrei. Fair and honest.

“I love you” is a rather primitive selfish nonsense. At least for me. True love is not respect, nor passion, nor common interests gathered in one bottle (as many people tend to think). Love is not a need, nor a necessity, as some individuals claim, who tend to think more simply.

Love is a UNION. A union sealed by freedom, as strange as it may sound. Oxymoron? (Or it’s not how they call it?) I don’t know. However, this also happens in life.

Author: Masha Lopatova