I'm what you might call an
emotional person. It's not that I
cry at everything or am so incredibly...well...
emotional. I just take things very deep to heart. When I care about a person, I care about them and I would do almost anything for them.
But there are some people who aren't as
irrational as I am. There are people like
my friend who are more
scientific,
analytical, and who think concretely. I asked him one day was he really not able to feel
love for anyone (because he had said that he's not really capable of having "those kind of emotions")? And he said that he has to put "
love" into a more tangible scale. The way he measured
love was by asking himself this: if the subject in mind was about to be shot, would he take a bullet for said person even if he knew that the subject would die? Another friend asked me wouldn't the question be more legitimate if you took a bullet for someone and you were the one to die, but I understand my first friend's thinking. Basically, if you knew your actions were useless, would you do it anyway?
I thought about this. Would I take a bullet for my
mother? Yeah, definitely. Would I take a bullet for my
father? Yeah, I'd do that too. Would I take a bullet for my
maternal grandmother who lives in
South Korea and I've only seen maybe three times in the past ten years? In a heartbeat. Would I take a bullet for my friend's boyfriend who is a great guy, but I've only known him for two months? Yeah.
And I just kept going.
My question is...
why? Why would I take a bullet for almost anyone that I remotely knew? And why doesn't this question work for me as a measure of whether or not I truly love someone? Does this mean that I truly love everyone? Or does it mean that I have no real concept of love and am some sort of robot ("must save everyone")? Or does it mean that I do truly love everyone and am still a robot...that I have no place in my mind for myself and am concentrated on other before me?
So then I thought, if my friend's question didn't work for me as a measure, what's my measure of love? How do I know if I truly love someone? The only answer I could come up with was, I don't have a measure of love and I probably won't ever know if I
truly love someone. Because I don't think you can ever measure love and I don't think you can ever really know how much you love a person until they're not there anymore.
Irony can be a cruel
bitch sometimes.