People don't seem prepared to embarrass themselves doing crazy things for the sake of love anymore. Gone seem the days that Plato described where a man in love would do any number of completely humiliating acts for the sake of trying to win the heart of a loved one.
The old saying "Faint heart never won fair lady" is still true. In fact people are so cocky and self-assured about finding someone that upon facing rejection, they seem to move increasingly quickly onto the next person they can find.
I am in love. I have been in love with R for over a year now. R is also my best friend. I thoroughly enjoy every moment that I'm in her company. We share a sense of humour. She is intelligent. She is one of the few people I speak to where I don't feel the need to dumb myself down. She is caring and generous. She is also flawed. It really irks me that she is so bad at expressing her feelings and that she doesn't organise to see people. But I love her.
We went out last year. There had been sexual tension between us since we had met, but it took a year for everything to line up so that we could go out. And it's never seemed a more natural progression of any relationship I've ever had. However, although we were meeting up regularly and every time we would meet up, we would end up making out, she took a while to agree that we were going out.
Then she broke up with me in June last year. We had a long talk in which she explained that she is too messed up for a relationship and needed to spend some time single for the first time in years. And she had very good reasons to feel messed up, which I won't divulge here.
We stayed friends, but not long after we stopped seeing each other. This was because she never calls anyone up to organise anything and I was being stubborn about the fact that she should call me.
Then, out of the blue, I called her a couple of weeks ago. I don't know why particularly. I had seen her again at NYE and I had realised that I still loved her. That thought had niggled away at me since, even though I had been getting along in life quite happily and had even pursued a couple of other girls (albeit with my heart not in it). So I called her.
I dressed up a bit without wanting to overdo it. She wore a nice dress and very nice earrings and looked quite stunning, without having overdone it either. The night finished with us making out. We ran into some friends of mine, but then continued making out later, which I saw as a sign that this wasn't her just getting carried away with the moment. I couldn't have been happier. For the next couple of weeks, I got through the long hours at work by reminding myself that in a few days' time I would be seeing R.
When I told her that holidays started on Thursday (I'm a school teacher), it was R who suggested meeting Thursday afternoon, which was unusually keen for her. Particularly seeing as she would have known that I would have been excitedly launching into a week of letting my hair down, I saw this as a positive sign.
Anyway, we talked for a short time before coming to discuss us going out and she said that she enjoys hanging out with me but there's a part of her gut instinct that is telling her to resist going out with me. She conceded that she is attracted to me, but she also reckons that she is even more screwed up than she was a year ago. She said she can't understand why I would want to be with her.
One philosophical difference between us is that she belongs to the Assembly of God church. I don't belong to an organised religion, but I pray and have a fairly complex set of religious beliefs, which resembles a mish-mash of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and my own ideas. Because of this, I do have some semi-fatalist views of the world.
I believe that there are 2 or 3 people who you could spend the rest of your life with, if you are lucky enough to meet them. When you meet someone who might be someone you could spend the rest of your life with, I believe you should hold onto that chance, because it may very well be the only chance you ever get in life.
R, I imagine believes in one person ordained by God to spend the rest of her life with. And I said to her that some of the things she was saying on Thursday sounded like she was scared to go out with me in case she fell in love with me. She did not reply to this.
My friends say I should now move on. I gave it several months and nothing came of it. I'm obviously still in shock, but I am coming to the conclusion that maybe they're wrong. Ordinarily I would have moved on as soon as we broke up. But I believed there was something different here.
And I also remembered a story of forbidden love I have always found very touching, that of fellow joeuser teegstar. I remember Matthew's friends making very derisive comments about his continued pursuit of Teegs. They had broken up, it had been years and she refused to talk to him for a year, and yet he continued to tell everyone that he was going to marry her. He was right. After all the embarrassment he went through, he is now happily married to Teegs. What if he had listened to the advice of his friends?
Then there is Sam Neill, one of Australasia's best actors:
ANDREW DENTON: Speaking of giving and love, when you met your wife, Noriko, was for you absolutely love at first sight. Was that a delicious sensation, or was it...
SAM NEILL: This is so well researched, this interview. Well, I think it was love at first sight. She came round to my house. She's a make-up artist, and she came round to introduce herself, and we had to make some decisions about the film. I mean, I'm not sure what love at first sight is, except that I opened the door and I thought, "Oh, my God!" And I think that's probably what love at first sight is - you have to have that sort of "Oh, my God" factor. That's how it is. I still feel like that when I see her.
ANDREW DENTON: Is that right?
SAM NEILL: Mmm.
ANDREW DENTON: The courtship, which you described as "long and audacious", was... Because if you've fallen deeply in love with somebody, it's basically an obsession. Was that a great time?
SAM NEILL: It was. It was a bit creepy and obsessive. Because it wasn't reciprocated at all, you know?
ANDREW DENTON: Really?
SAM NEILL: And so I had to besiege her, really, and it was, you know... We were on Hamilton Island, so I had to get flowers sent from the mainland. And I'd wait for her to get back from work, and the pathetic figure standing at the door - "Would you take these flowers?" You know. Went on like that. It was awful, really... But it worked out...
ANDREW DENTON: Well, it did.
SAM NEILL: I think persistence pays off in these things.
How very Platonic (in the true sense of the word). Matthew doesn't believe it could work out between R and I because I'm not a Christian. But we would not be breaking any new ground in that either. In fact, many people have formed life long relationships with people of very different faiths. There are always challenges in this, but they can be overcome.
Elwyn points out that the chances of R and I being a story like this are exceptionally outweighed by the amount of unrequited love in the world. Maybe so, but none of those stories would have ever occurred, if they had been put off by that.
But what that perspective also comes down to I think is that people have become so keen to avoid pain, and to skip to the good bits, that no one is prepared to stick their neck out for love anymore. Or very rarely anyway. Perhaps I would get hurt, but that is not the end of the world either. At the moment, I don't believe I will. I believe that I love R and that this relationship is supposed to be more than it has been. Any thoughts?