Loves me, loves me not
I listened to a friend the other night talking about her boyfriend. She lives daily in the shadow of questions about their future.
I don’t know why this provoked a childhood image of young girls picking off flower petals in a roulette of “loves me” and “loves me not”, but in response to my query about what she most loves about him, she says she loves most what she thinks he could be.
July 27th, 2005 23:33
I was there once. It was frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying. I will no longer base my relationships on what could be, but on what they are in the here and now.
July 28th, 2005 07:54
start a relationship on what is, not what could be. if you can’t love him for what he is, loving him for what he could be will not allow the relationship to mature. change may never happen.
July 28th, 2005 08:50
Carl Rogers used to say this, that change begins with acceptance. I don’t remember if he said it was easier to say or do : )
July 28th, 2005 09:45
This was sweet, and satisfied the romantic in me. It reminded me of two wonderful cinematic moments: Cranky Jack Nicholson trying to clean up his act by telling Helen Hunt that “you make me want to be a better man” and a lovely little riff by Renee Zelweger, enthusing about her beau Tom Cruise/Jerry Maguire and how she loves the man he could be, and the man he almost is. Okay, so the hard-bitten realists in us recognize that all the self-help advice is true: you can’t change people, blah, blah. But as a 20-year married, let me say that close, loving relationships are also built on a lovely dynamic of people slowly (sometimes glacially) meeting each other half way on a whole range of attitudes and actions. And that’s another way of talking about a loved one and their potential for being a better person.