Response

Austin Hafner

English 1100

Response Paper

A Presence You Can’t Define

It was a clear October afternoon, over a year ago, when I went to visit my brother and his recently married spouse for dinner. When I walked up to the front door, I was greeted with warm smiles and a cheerful atmosphere. There was no denying the fact that my brother was the happiest I had ever seen him in that moment. After I had exchanged greetings with the married couple, my brother went to wrap his zingy-infused arms around his wife. The image was such an incredibly beautiful depiction of love that I could easily link the two together. As the rest of the evening elapsed, I could sense a feeling of love was truly in the air, wrapping itself around me like a cashmere blanket. There were no signs of disconnection between them, no hints of anger or dispute. I asked them both, “How did you guys know you were made for each other? What led you two to believe that this was going to be something special?” There was a brief pause, they looked at each other with a similar cheery expression, as if they both knew the answer to my question. My brother looked back at me and responded with this: “I don’t know man. I guess we’ve both gone through enough experiences, in our own lives, to know what we both wanted out of a relationship. Sometimes you just have to take chances and experience life for what it really is so that you can understand yourself better. Once our lives began to intertwine, I bonded with her like no one else I had ever been with before. I couldn’t be more sure of anything that the person sitting here, right next to me, is the one I want to spend the rest of my life with. I don’t think it, I don’t feel it, I just know it is true.”

It was difficult to imagine that my brother was not telling the truth. However, the concept of “knowing” was hard to wrap my head around. How can an individual begin to define what it means to know when you are in love? There was a point in my life when I truly believed I was in love with this girl I started dating back in high school. We were in a relationship for over two years and we confessed how much we cared abut each other. The images I was able to see, between my brother and his wife, were images I similarly experienced in my relationship as well and yet, we were unable to stay together. How could this have happened? What aspect of love was I missing in my relationship that my brother was able to find in his? I was fifteen at the time I started my high school relationship. My brother was twenty-two when he married his wife. Does age make a difference when it comes to being in love with someone?

 My other brother, Joel, is the middle child between my married brother and myself and he was caught in a similar situation as me. He began dating his girlfriend during his tenth grade year of high school. However, unlike me, Joel is now continuing his third year of college and he is still with the same girl. How was he able to maintain his relationship all these years and I was not? What aspect of love was I missing? The other odd component about it all was that Joel normally had commitment issues and sticking to a plan was never part of his agenda. However, you need commitment to be in a relationship with someone and that is a characteristic of showing love. I have always been the more organized member of the family, always sticking to a plan and mapping out my day. How could someone more unorganized as me find love? Does organization even play a role at all?

Before I dive in  any further, let’s take a couple steps back. First of all, love does not necessarily have to come out of a marriage, or a relationship, with another boy or girl. Love can come from your parents, your siblings, or close friends as well. The precarious part of this though is that the love you receive from your parents or peers is not quite the same as the love you receive from your spouse and yet, you relate them both as signs of love. How is that possible? Could it be that there are different variations of love? This would mean that love would have different levels and barrier points depending on the relationship. A friendship, for example, contains elements of love when two people invest time in each other and engage in constructive conversations, but that may be the extent of how far love will go in the relationship. On the other hand, a married couple  has all the elements of love from a friendship standpoint, but it also becomes a little more intimate than a friendship because more time is spent with each other and multiple levels of affection can be shown here. However, is it possible to show signs of affection in a friendship without pushing past the friendship barrier and heading into more intimate territory?

There was a time when I was in middle school when I met this girl named Brandi, who sat next to me in my world history class. One day the teacher instructed the class to accumulate into groups of three or four to discuss the chapters we read over world culture and of course, she happened to be in the same group as me. As the group conversation circled, we ran into a question that discussed why cultures often clashed with each other. Brandi started to hit on some really interesting points about cultures lacking diversity and how people should learn to respect all groups of society. The class adjourned shortly after our discussion, but I really thought Brandi had brought up a good point; so I went out of my way, after class, to tell her that and I also added that she had remarkable insight on the world. There was no real feelings of interest for this girl, I knew for certain I did not love her, I just wanted to let her know she had a good point in our history class. Next thing I know, she starts following me to class everyday, her friends begin to ask me if I like her or not, and then pretty soon, the whole school thinks I’m in love with Brandi from world history. The point is, my words and my actions came off to her as if I was showing particular interest in her, even though those were not my intentions. Therefore, based on my experience, you cannot show signs of affection in a friendship without pushing past the friendship barrier.

Although affections in a friendship can be destructive, it is still not the case for every friendship out there. I know people who maintain strong friendships with others, where affections, such as providing words of affirmation, are given to show care and compassion without crossing over towards a more intimate relationship. Also, the problem between Brandi and I was that we were never friends to begin with. We just knew each other because we had the same world history class. Would the situation have been any different if Brandi and I were friends from the very beginning? Would she have still taken my words and actions to mean something more than just me being a friendly student?

This is why love is a tricky concept because it is not clearly defined by any means. Love can be openly left to interpretation. However, the really interesting, or odd, part about it is that everyone can feel it and sense its presence. We all know it is there, but we just can’t seem to wrap our heads around it.