Love

As I've posted on every social media site in the history of the world, I'm leaving China on July 17th. I'm flying to Denver to get the apartment in Boulder sorted out first, and as for what happens after that, your guess is as good as mine. 

That gets me thinking about all the people I'll be leaving behind. 

In everything that you do, you are sacrificing something else to do that thing. In every decision you make, you have to sacrifice one thing to do another. Ideally, you make decisions that give you the maximum amount of happiness and satisfaction in life. By reading late at night, I sacrifice an hour or two of sleep. By living in China, I sacrifice a part my life, my relationships, my friendships, and my family that I love in order to do what I need to do halfway across the world. By leaving China, I sacrifice the life that I have built and the relationships I have made to continue growing intellectually.

The same goes for relationships, both romantic and platonic. Being in a relationship means that you have to sacrifice a small (or sometimes big) part of yourself for someone else. And that is the beauty of a relationship. It is a selfless act to say to someone, “I care about you so much that I am willing to give up some of my own desires to make you happy.” And that is beautiful. But in some ways it is also sad, because you have to give up things you would normally do, or people you would normally meet, or hobbies you would normally enjoy for someone else. So what are the costs and what are the benefits of a relationship?

When you are in a relationship with someone else, as long as it is a healthy one, then hopefully they are changing you into a better person. I believe in the Buddhist philosophy that you are made up of a sum of all your parts, and every person you ever come into contact with is one of the parts that makes up who you are as a person. I think that when you are in a romantic relationship with someone, they become perhaps a bigger part than most platonic friendships, because you open yourself emotionally and physically to that person, an action of extreme vulnerability that requires an incredible amount of trust. 

The deeper you fall in love, however, the more you open yourself, the more you let yourself be vulnerable, and the more you invest yourself in someone, then the more pain you are going to feel later. I think it's worth it (unless you are in an abusive relationship). I think love is worth the suffering that will inevitably come later. I say it’s inevitable because there will always be either a break-up or divorce, a time when you fall out of love, or a period of long-distance love. Even if you are one of the lucky ones that end up in a happy marriage for life, you still have to endure the day-to-day emotional baggage of being responsible for someone and someone else being responsible for you. Just simply being vulnerable to someone else creates a lot of anxiety and insecurity when you could otherwise live alone in freedom of this emotional investment. There is no free pass in relationships. But, again, the pain and suffering, the anxiety and sacrifices that are inevitable in every relationship, are worth it because in the end, you become a better person because of your partner. The more you are vulnerable, then the more you will love. The more you care, then the more you will suffer but the happier you will be. And this has been my experience with relationships thus far in my life.

The pain I will experience on July 17th will be worth it, considering all of the wonderful human beings I have met and the new, better, healthier, happier person I have become because of them.

One of my favorite Ted Talks, a must-see: Brene Brown on Vulnerability

Chinese word of the day: 
易受伤的- yi4shou4shang1de- "easy to receive the hurt" aka vulnerable