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valentine's day
I do not really observe Valentine's Day. I exchange a box of chocolates with my mom and that's about it. Tonight I will be getting together with Chris to make music, and I do not predict that it will be any more romantic than usual.
But I have been thinking, today, about love. In particular, I am considering the network of relationships between love and compromise.
Should we be willing to compromise ourselves in order to find love? If you suffer difficulty in finding love, and you think you can link that difficulty to a particular set of your traits, would it be wise to try to eliminate those traits (or refine them, or smooth them out)? Or would it be better to seek, perhaps in vain, for someone who will accept you, warts and all? Is there a way to safely make the call about which traits are crucial to your identity, and which could conceivably be sacrificed in order to increase your "loveability"? Or is thinking that way just going to lead you to trouble, leave you with a calculated "committee self," pleasing to no one?
On one hand I think any compromise of the self in order to win love is a bad idea, and on the other hand I think that disregarding self-improvement—and just allowing the self to randomly develop as it may—takes the ideology of individualism to its solipsistic extreme.
I'm not really looking for answers to these questions. Each of us comes up with our own answers to them, and each answer is "right" in its own way. Or "wrong" in its own way, depending on whether you're an optimist or a pessimist.
Anyway. Happy Valentine's Day to you, dear reader. Labels: relationships |
Thursday, February 14, 2002
7:00 PM
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