I feel compelled to write this as I don't want any confusion between me and someone I truly respect.
I feel that all to often we as a society confuse or don't understand the difference between love and lust for reasons that I won't get into in this post.
To me lust is all about the 'I'. I want this thing, or I want to be with this person. It can be possessive and worrying only about how we feel in the moment. This is when it is taken to the extreme, and it doesn't necessarily need to be a bad thing as we do need some desire to want to be together.
If lust is all about the 'I', what is loves focus? To me love is all about 'them.' It's about the ability to take the 'I' out of the equation and being able to ask what is best for that person you purport to care about. It's about being honest with yourself, and respecting them enough to care what is best for them. Respecting their wishes even if it's not what you want.
There also needs to be a love of self and the ability to recognize that the object of our desire is not always the best thing for us.
In any healthy relationship there needs to be a balance between love and lust. Love is not lust and lust is not love.
About Me
- Josh Kruschke
- Austin, TX, United States
- Postings will be sporadic and on an as I feel like it basis.
Good, true words. My Dad had two really good marriage, both over 30 years both ending in the death of a beloved wife. He was still very physically affectionate with them even after all the years, even as he got quite old. You could tell, there was both parts of it in there.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the words.
You are creating an ideolect (which we each do).
ReplyDeleteMy experience of relationships doesn't so easily fall into categories of lust or love. I love my children, but it's not all about them, nor are my desires for that relationship really in the lust category. If this post is meant to be about sexual/romantic relationships, maybe you'd like to make that explicit.
This post was about extremes. About the confusion and mislabeling of what or why we feel the way we do about those a round us.
ReplyDeleteDifferent people have a different understanding of the emotions that run our lives. There is a whole range of meaning to the emotions that we feel. Where I think we get in trouble is when the focus is all about us or them with no balance.
If I say, "I love you." What does that mean really? Does that mean 'I' can't stand to live without you, or I want what is best for 'you.' Is it possessive or inclusive? .
When a parent says I want what is best for my kid, are they looking at this from what will make the child happy or them selves? "I want my child to be a doctor" is this statement made because the parent thinks the child would be happy as a doctor, or that the parent would be happy/proud to be the parent of a doctor? Is the focus 'I' or 'them?'
Yes, I know what we feel is usually somewhere in between the extremes, and what is needed in all our relationships is balance: between parent to child, between siblings, between friends and even between enemies; as, hate is on the opposite side of love on the emotional scale.
We just need to look and understand why we feel the things we do, and yes I know this is hard to do in the moment that we are feeling them.
What you said here makes sense to me. :)
ReplyDelete