A lot of us have undergone, and lots will still undergo, the agony in deciding whether or not to declare our undying affection to someone. But most of us just endure the torture of being silent and suppressing the truth. Why the choice? Telling the truth is not as virtuous as most religions would have wanted us to believe, if by virtuous we mean to say it is naturally and inherently good that is . Truth hurts. Reality bites. Haven't we heard enough? I guess we haven't, and we seem to have this addiction of dwelling in pain. How have we become so masochistic? Perhaps it is when religion implicitly taught us to equate virtue with pain and vice with pleasure.
We are human beings, and perhaps emotional pain, besides logic, is something that separates us from the rest of the kingdom animalia. Like what Agent Smith said in The Matrix, human beings couldn't handle sweet perfection (which was the original model of the Matrix world that later on failed) because we define our reality through suffering and misery, and anything less than that, anything remotely close to perfection, our sanity cannot manage. So inspite of our complaints, we feel that pain is a natural condition of life. But the tricky part that I recently learned is that no matter how much we, perhaps unwittingly, embrace suffering we'd rather choose to hurt ourselves than let others hurt us, even if the former is frequently more intoxicating and debilitating than the latter.
When we love, romantically speaking, we rarely choose to declare our love because we know doing so would make us vulnerable. It is wrong to open ourselves out to someone who could take our emotions away, just to wrestle with them only to later on throw them away. We'd rather choose to suffer in silence. Most of the time, this option is extremely melancholy, worse than the fear of rejection or deliberate deception, and it seems only natural that a person would prefer this option. Why? because it's personal, because self-inflicted pain is more acceptable than one that is externally inflicted. Why? because that's how we embrace life. Besides, misery should not seek company; misery should be taken care of without it.
I find the act of confessing our undying love similar to suicide, and I know a lot of people will agree with me on this. This is not because our honesty would necessarily cost us our dear lives, but more because of the idea of the act being irreversible. In suicide, if we succeed, we can't say, "whoops, I didn't mean to cut my wrist and loose a huge amount of blood", or cry "I'm sorry, I didn't know jumping off the 40th floor would crash my skull and make my brain splatter on the ground," or wail "Whoa, so walking in front of a very fast-moving vehicle would be fatal, I have to tell the others, I have to live." We can't shout apologies, and say sorry can we come back to life now? When we kill ourselves, we die.
Confessing our love would be quite similar, although not as gory as it sounds. Confession obviously uses words, and when words fly we cannot catch 'em. Once we say, "I love you," we really can't take it back by saying, "pati ah!" or "jowk-jowk-jowk!!" Well, we could say some can get away withit, and I have to agree only if the object of desire has an IQ of 60. The thing is, once we utter words of devotion, we just have to face the consequences, and most of the time, I have to say we are terrified of the consequences. Although the chances could go either way, I mean it could either cause our heart to jump for joy or for it to flounder in pain, we only rivet our attention on the latter possibility. The only way that we think we could avoid exacerbating the agony would be by convincing ourselves that our hearts will never jump for joy, otherwise we might get our hopes up and by doing so would only worsen our condition in case floundering in pain is the possibility that ensues. Defense mechanism my friends, that's what it is.
And in my case, there is that awful stage where I almost hope for the plausibility of her knowing how I feel about her, that maybe I don't have to confess and that I only have to affirm whatever assumption she has of me. That's when I hate her the most. I have the audacity to hope that she might discover it for herself. But whenever I think I am giving her the liberty to assume, it seems her density level goes beyond any scientific formula could ever compute.
I have to ask, why then should I let her in? Why should I share this suffering, this burden? Why should I utter the words "I love you", when this would mean I will end up joining those herds of romantic crooks who have misused and abused the phrase, they've trivialized it so much it no longer bears the meaning of pure and genuine affection. I'm too good for that, I won't give in. Between suffering in silence and losing my life in honesty, I would choose the safer one, I would rather keep my mouth sealed.
But what difference does it make, I still suffer, I still writhe in despair. In the end, I want something to hold on to. I want to be proven wrong, tell me to choose the other option.
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