Theory Of Devotional Equilibrium

My mother is your typical woman that sheds too many nuggets of wisdom. Most of them seem unnecessary until it hits you squarely in the face one day. Bugger. But there's this one thing she said that have always haunted me: "When you choose to be with someone, you have to make sure that he loves you more than you love him."

It sounded so unhealthy that I didn't know what to do with it. I did what every rebellious teen-ager would do -- unabashedly ignored it. And yes, I did regret it. I went around wearing my heart on my sleeves completely unmindful of the cuts and bruises that it garnered along the way. It wasn't until the final and worst blow that I made the conscious decision of becoming more selfish with it. Nursing it back to health was no mean feat, after all. Ever since then, I learned to love with my head. I only allow my heart to speak when the head has given it the green light. To love with the heart had always been my downfall -- it blinded me and it weakened me.

It sounds terribly cold, I'm aware, but let's simply consider it as my defense mechanism (one of my many). Contrary to popular belief, I'm quite a simplistic person. Whenever I care enough for someone (may it be family, a friend or a partner), I will give them my one thousand percent. No question. But what I learned the hard way is that to say that I don't expect anything in return for would be hogwash (or ferocious naivete). Not that unconditional love is the Holy Grail; it does exist -- but simply, it is reserved for the most unadulterated and noble cases.

There is that old adage where people claim that love is a two-way street. And it is. However, it was never designed to always be a fifty-fifty street. There are times when one gives more to the other; and likewise, other times would warrant for one to take more than the other. But when something as infinite as time is involved, this balance may either evolve or diminish. More often than not, I'm the one that ends up giving more as I have the tendency to get more attached (and I'm not sure if this is a product of me being of the Y-chromosome). I've never been one to count stock, but when the gap between efforts start becoming glaringly obvious, that's when I begin approaching a screeching halt -- and I very rarely look back.

If I have to plot my usual progress in a line graph, I tend to start at floor-zero with a very slow but steady upward movement. In my past experience, all my counterparts have started from the opposite, which is a perfect hundred -- with a lethargic decline through time, eventually hitting a plateau. In an eventual turn, our lines will cross and we will sit on a happy equilibrium. I am more than content with plateaus as long as it's on a level that I can work with (with the occasional spikes along the way). But once it dips below what is reasonable or once it stagnates -- and especially if it experiences a steep nosedive -- then I pull myself out.

To pseudo-quantify devotion like that is terrible, yes, I know. But for my mother to tell me that I must find someone who loves me more than I love him -- it is basically her telling me to find someone who has the capability to love me on a more or less equal footing to the kind of love I will be giving him in the future. Because I work on an inversely progressive direction, in the perfect world, we will eventually reach the halfway house. And perhaps, if happily ever after does exist, we may even achieve that. But of course, that's another thing worth pondering for another day. I haven't quite gotten there yet.