I'm diving in.

"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

Nice quote huh? I thought so. Last night I had a good talk with my neighbor (see post below) and today I had a very open and honest conversation with a friend, a conversation of which I would like to write.

My friend, we'll call him Dominic, and I talked primarily about relationships. After the last post, I was intrigued by his thoughts on the subject. Dominic and his boyfriend Blaine have been seeing each other for a couple months and have of late experienced some turmoil. You see, Blaine is very emotional and strongly believes that relationships are the core of life (hence my connection to this particular blog). Having a romantic connection is vital to his being. Dominic on the other hand, values friendship and puts less weight in that crazy little thing called love.

Our conversation got me to thinking...as usual. After allowing our words to tumble around in the washing machine that is my brain, I have concluded that friendship is more important than love. Award winning actor, Carl Reiner, agrees. He says that "Lust is easy. Love is hard. Like is most important." How true is that!? I mean relationships seem ridiculous if they're founded on the modern interpretation of love. In our talk, Dominic and I agreed that most people are not emotionally prepared for relationships until they are fully aware and comfortable with themselves. There will always be a level of emotional inequality between two people, which sometimes manifests itself into one partner feeling inadequate or inferior. This is starting to kill my romantic vision of love, in a good humor sort of way.

To be honest, I greatly fear relationships. I'm sure I could identify the root cause of this, but I'd rather not go into that at the moment. It's hard to describe, but basically I always know what my brain is thinking and what action I want to take...you can never know that of other people. So every time you let yourself trust someone completely, as required by healthy relationships, you put yourself at risk. Now, I'm not one to shy away from risk-except in this case it seems. They just scare me.

BUT...okay I have to defend my initial quote now after all that negativity and blah blah blah. Perhaps the appeal of relationships is that they do provide each individual with the "charming gardener" to make them happy. hmm, here's this happiness thing again. If, at the end of the day, you have someone who makes you love life, well then maybe you've discovered its meaning. We may be getting somewhere here.

Ps. Throughout this post, lovey country songs keep coming on. Maintaining a pessimistic view of love is rather difficult with Keith Urban's "Somebody like You" playing in the background... quite loudly I might add.