Of Loving, Liking and Reciprocating

Warning: Title and article may not match.

It  is another Richie Online Friday and here we are with another piece. I have forgiven you if you are disappointed with the fact that this article is not about Zimbabwe. We cannot talk about Zimbabwe because even the military which gsot things rolling is pretty unsure of what they are doing. Let’s leave Zimbabwean issues for Zimbabweans to worry about.

Earlier this week, I found myself pondering upon the mystery of love and its role in shaping marriage and relationships. It probably would not be a very good idea for me to reveal why I got into such thoughts but once again I got to wander through the part of my thoughts jungle where I ask myself as to what love is and what being in love really entails. These reflections led to a chain reaction of thoughts and I got to ask myself as to which one was the best between being on the giving and the receiving end of love. Having answered the question, I got more curious as to what my friends thought about the same. It was at that point that I posed the same question to my Whatsapp friends through a status post (some of you might have seen and responded to it). “Who would you rather be with? Someone you love or someone who loves you?”

To be honest, I did not expect many to respond but the number and diversity of the responses was just overwhelming. While few decided to give me a lecture of how complex the situation I was asking about was, some decided to give a plain answer to the question, citing the reasons why they would rather be either with someone they love or someone who loves them. The former pointed out that for some reason love is a nice thing when you are on the giving end and that sometimes with just enough love you tend to get the person you love to reciprocate. The other group was rather interesting. Most of the people who opted for the person who loves them were about avoiding the risk of not being loved back and some just wanted that extra security. The most interesting point from this group was that of being in control. For some reason, someone felt like thy can pull the strings of the relationship when they are the “loved one”. Somehow, that is how people think about relationships.

As I earlier mentioned, there were some that opted not to answer but to rather give a lecture on how complex the issue I was asking about was. That was a fair point to raise but what people overlooked was that I was asking a crude question without contextualizing it and immersing it into the imaginations of the realities we all live in. You might agree with me that it is (almost) stupid to assume that all people one loves do not love them back or the other way round. In some (if not most) cases, the feeling is mutual in varied proportions. More often than not, however, there is a significant difference in the levels of commitment between spouses or hopefuls in any relationship and this is where the question applies the most. Who would you want to be with? The person who contributes 8 out of 10 and leaves you to do the two, or the person who lets you do the 7 while sluggishly contributing the 3? Rather interesting but that is far from being it when it comes to the full understanding of these things because there also comes the issue of subjectivity and objectivity.

We all at one point have heard or used the saying, “love is blind”. I must admit that I have just gotten to fully understand this saying lately and I am still trying to decide whether it is true or not. In essence, the idea behind the blindness of love entails that someone can easily fall for a person despite their status, background or character. The interesting thing, however is that these attributes cannot be completely dismissed if one is to get into a relationship with the slightest degree of seriousness let alone marriage. What I have come to conclude is that subjectivity and objectivity have complementary roles in the making and sustaining of any relationship. Example? You might get into that thing called love at first sight with the person of your dreams and get along for a moment only for you to discover that they are uneducated, they are broke or they do not like you receiving links to Richie Online articles; consequently forcing you to back out. The other way might be that you might find this nice church-going and respectable potential spouse and like them from the start only to discover that your heart doesn’t really tickle for them when you get closer. There we are with two verbs, then. Loving and liking.

I strongly believe that for any relationship to work there has to be a bit of loving complemented by liking and this is what I would call the complementary nature of subjectivity and objectivity. The blind and subjective nature of love allows people to get together despite their attributes but it is the objectivity (liking) that allows people to stay together by correcting and adjusting to one another.

The problem we have nowadays is that we have become a society of either left wing or right wing extremists who are either too objective or too subjective. While this may be dictated by circumstances, I still believe that there is a way of getting around it. In other words, I do not think it is entirely wise to take in someone based solely on how you feel about them in the same way it is not nice to just pick someone because of their status. The danger with such is that such relationships collapse when you run out of the juice of feelings (in the case of following the bling thing called love) or if the status of the person changes (classic example is when a spouse whose money you followed gets broke).

Solution? While we all have to fall and report to our feelings, we need to employ a certain level of objectivity and decide what kind of spouse we want to settle for. It is important because of the complementary nature of the two things; your feelings and your spouse’s nature. If you are not happy with the way you feel about them, you tend to stay because of what they are and the other way round. Those are two things acting like ESCOM power and a diesel generator, if you want to think about it that way. Every relationship has to be fueled by a bit of both loving and liking.

We probably do not give much thought to these things but I think they are important especially for those of you who have never tasted a relationship. Ma veteran inu you know better than this. Things to consider? Loving and liking, what end of the equation you want to be at and the possibility of reciprocation. Looking at these prior to the conception of a relationship could save us a lot of breakups… Or so I think.