my love life (or the absolute lack of it)
For the past decade and more, since I've been able to exchange my thoughts and life experiences with the masses, I'd been extremely open (and quite synonymous to being an "oversharer") about my romantic relationships.
My friends who have been around since those days know all of my entire romantic history anyway. It's really quite hilarious, because even I myself had only just started documenting my life in analogue (outside of diaries). It's not so admirable how much I've shared my life online, and even more embarrassing now as someone beginning their 30s.
To begin with, the title is what it is: I cannot say I have what is called a "love life" now. However, that does not mean that my life is absent when it comes to love. I do love my friends, and I do love my family. It's okay when my family cannot afford what my friends can, and that my friends cannot support me in the ways my family can. That is why we have diverse groups of people around us - so that we do not limit the aspect, or "benefits" of "love" to just one.
I have always tried my best to have various friends from different parts and phases of my life. People I met from different times of my life are meant to meet those parts of me, and it's okay if it's not all in whole (within means). I do not share interests with people I still talk to from my Degree, but we have values we still do share: compassion, importance of education, and love for linguistics. The same can be said for friends of other groups.
In an earlier post, I noted that Chou and I felt like very different people. I fragmented my online and offline identity, despite sharing much of my offline life to the online identity, but the fragmented aspect remained: I could not be truthfully the person I am offline, the same way I could not be the person I am online, when it comes to offline. There are reasons why this still stands true, but I have become a lot less embarrassed about sharing the things I do online (namely singing, drawing and writing) to the people offline as I meet more like-minded and open-minded people throughout my adulthood.
That said, the title of this post was about my love life, not my friendships.
I have become quite the picky one, I realised. I didn't think I was picky when it came to romance for the longest time. But in reflecting the past few months and years, I may have realised that in order to truly feel "met" and "seen", I would need the person I want to spend the rest of my life with to meet me for the many, many fragments and sides of me.
This is how friendships and romance differ to me - I am okay with friends who are only able to meet some sides of me while sharing my values, but I would need my romantic prospect to share values and also meet all sides of me. The same way I'd need to face all sides of them, and therefore I need this person to be able to face themselves.
I have also listed just how much sharing the same language means to me, which is important in reaching the same level of emotional vulnerability and understanding in order to feel "seen", and "heard". I think this is the goal for a lot of lasting romantic relationships, and it does require quite a lot of time spent alone, whether it be mentally or emotionally to reach. For most, romantic relationships are merely ways to "feel less alone", which was how it was for me growing up, which has become quite the ironic outcome - I've been living alone for longer than a decade, despite my dating history.
That is to say, I have only made myself more alone in not giving myself time to understand who I am, but maybe being in relationships has helped me also develop my own self-understanding - it does go both ways. I do not, however, regret any of the lessons I've learned in reaching this far. It is only because of the "embarrassing" lessons that I've even reached this conclusion, and there should be no shame in learning.