On Love With a Friend From Uni

A discussion I had when I was drinking with a friend I met at Uni. We both study philosophy.

I must discuss a different topic. One I have discussed with a friend I met at the. After the last class in my first year I went to a bar with a friend I met. He had the same name as me. We drank and talked. The red colours of the seats and surrounding expressed my arousal and the numbness I experienced. I recall laughing and deep thinking in a state of delirious and somehow found that being in a state of delirium or soft drunkenness is when I find myself being able to fiercely express my way of thinking through a path that normally never seems accessible. As if wooziness enables me to have conversation about one of the hardest topics of them all. We discussed the meaning and point of sleeping around, on which I have already expressed a few fierce words, and how it affects your sense of finding and contributing to love or simply said binding to a person more than you do to a friend. On the latter I will return.

“What does it means to be in love?”, I asked my friend from uni. He had no clue at first and started to talk while he was still thinking. “It’s more than just friendship in the sense that we have a different bond with the person concerned when he or she would be our loved partner or “merely”, as I add, a friend. I find it hard to remember the whole conversation but I do still remember the overall concept of what we eventually came up with.

At one point we stumbled upon a difficulty. Yet we stated that loving consists of a physical aspect, which is determined by having sex and kissing, and of a strong friendship. The latter we found because saying that a relationship with someone is totally different from the one you have with a friend rules out a range of things a couple of lovers and a couple of friends have in common. Such as discussing about ideas that you do not discuss with someone you barely know or you’re just hanging out with . This seems very obvious but to be complete we have to point it out. This does not imply that someone who does not hangout with a person cannot be in love with this person; however, it is, in my opinion, a fact that not seeing someone physically can make a relationship harder in most cases. So does it make a relationship more difficult when everything lovebirds talk about are mere narrow subjects without any depth or profoundness. For example merely speaking about the everyday things of life, like what you did that day or what you’re planning to do. This does not mean that lovebirds only have to talk about profound stuff and only have in depth conversations, not at all! It is important to have shallow conversations since they help you forget the everyday rut and all. But to have only shallow conversations does not, in my opinion, make a relationship very good. Neither does it do any good to a friendship. So we should always seek for a certain balance between shallow and profound conversations. I personally think that time and place of a conversation partially influence the profoundness or shallowness of that conversation and therefore I might suggest that you can create such moments, but only partially. Pushing it too far will only lead to the opposite in case of these conversations.

Still our problem was that we did not consent this definition since it can be viewed as describing friends who have sex without any love or affection involved; I believe this strikes deeply with the idea that searching for a sex partner is always searching for intimacy and affection. As if it is staring into the devil’s soul. Perhaps love is not graspable and perhaps this was a dead end discussion but I at least felt as getting more insight in loving merely for the fact that I was discussing it with someone else. I cherish this friend. He’s the only one I ever had such a profound discussion with.

Anyhow, since we did not find a conclusion we resumed our thinking path and started throwing around ideas. The conclusion might have been fairly obvious: love consists out of three “aspects”. The first one is the physical aspect which is merely having intercourse and kissing. The second one is the friendship involved in love which is just the usual good friendship. This is not a special friendship between lovers but just a decent friendship in which you are able to regard your lover as a good friend you can relate to and exchange ideas with. And with whom you can have shallow and profound conversations. About the third aspect we were somewhat unclear. The first two aspects can be separated or if combined viewed as merely having a sex partner who you don’t love but just have sex with. So either we had to state that such sex partner actually does not really exist but that conclusion seemed not very convincing although it might have been a very interesting investigation. Anyhow, we stated that, when in a relationship, there must be some kind of a connection between two persons. Some special connection that combines the first two aspects and raise them to a different level. What that might be is very unclear, but so is love. Perhaps we had found why love is so incomprehensible or perhaps we were just getting too drunk. Anyway, I thought our ideas were very interesting.

I started to wonder how people around us would perceive us. Oh how I would want to be so indifferent and not tormented to have to think about everything! I sound like a spoiled brat complaining about the great amount of gold in his bag. On that I can only object by saying that the gold you might perceive is worth far less than the nothingness in which you abide. To put it literately, I would rather be as numb and as ignorant as some, than overthinking every twitch I make or every thought that forms in my mind.