Love, of All Things

July 8, 2011 · by · in Personal, Soapbox

It’s not like me to post something so personal. Maybe I’m just getting older, or my own life experiences are equating to me thinking about such things more often. But I was thinking about how to articulate love into a metaphor that could be universally understood. Here’s what I came up with. Read all about it after the jump (click the title).

Sometimes I have a hard time articulating how relationships affect me, or how I perceive relations affect everyone. The English language is not exactly rife with colorful ways to lament about such things. So, I usually try to approach things in metaphor. This is what I came up with.

In the paradigm of love, there’s yourself, the body that, well, embodies the relationship from your perspective alone; and there’s the significant other, the sum of which is a unique “body” as well. The blood is what keeps the body living, growing, etc. Now, I won’t go into the food that the body (both of them) need to stay nourished, the exercise, etc. But you can carry this part of the story elsewhere (intellectual stimulation, disease, hygiene, etc.); so, let’s focus on just the blood part of keeping the body healthy from a very basic 10,000-foot level.

The blood is love, made up of arguably the main things that love needs, those being

  • compassion
  • attraction
  • empathy
  • intimacy
  • trust
  • communication
  • understanding
  • tolerance
  • patience
  • desire
  • acceptance
  • compromise

and probably other things, but the point is, work with me on the metaphor.

Now, no two people are alike so the percentages of each of the ingredients of the blood (love) mentioned above is different for both partners.

Like all things in life, we bleed when we are wounded, and sometimes the wounds take a long time to heal. It takes varying amounts of time to replenish the amount of blood your body can produce. Circumstances may wound constantly, and we bleed constantly, losing the vital blood that keeps the relationship (the “body”) alive.

One may run out of the necessary amount of patience part of the blood faster than the other party in the relationship (who, for their part, may be bone dry (pun intended) of compassion or empathy). Others may have a heaping amount of desire that no matter how deep the wound, they still desire the other person, but may be running very low on understanding and acceptance.

I think it’s very rare to be in a relationship with another that has the same percentages of the fundamental ingredients in their blood. If you can find that, good on you, mate.