To Categorize Is To Control

[Probably insisting that one is not a freak isn't the best way to convince people of that. Especially when you're not entirely sure whether it's true.]

[I've been aware lately ("Lately?! Have you read you're own diary?" - Ed.) that my relationships with other people have a tendency to bleed. Having had some legal training, I've become more aware than I had been of lists, categories, criteria that must be met for a certain situation to be described a certain way, and for action to be taken as a result. This works OK in areas like the law, where order is the whole point. Anarchy is a hell of a way to run a society.]

[But love? The fact that there's just one word to describe the affective bonds that link family, friends, romantic partners of all flavors, people to their tastes (I "love" chocolate), even citizens to their nation, suggests that the actual feelings in each of these categories somehow resemble those in the other categories. They're not the same, and are especially distinguishable one from the other by their intensity and by how much we're driven to devote to them, for good or ill.]

[But they can't be walled off from one another. To say that the "love" I feel for my sister is as different from the love I feel for a boyfriend as apples are from nuclear weapons simply does not tell the whole story. No, I have no sexual interest in my sister, and not because I'm gay (alarmed you there for a minute, didn't I?). But the hardest part of breaking up with John was the very real fact that he'd been family just as much as he'd been my lover, my very dear friend, and my helpmeet. It's one of the hardest things in the world to cut a dear family member out of your life, and I could have done it (mostly) only for the most serious of reasons.]

[I've always had a problem with crushes on my best friends. My early 20s were spent meeting a new, great friend (most of whom are still around, blessedly) and promptly falling into what I believed was Love, the romantic kind. The years I was coupled (Ben, '93-'95, and John, '97-'03) eliminated these corrosive crushes, and I thought I was over them.]

[Not so fast. For the last two and a half years, I suffered through the most powerful one yet. Circumstances made this one tantalizingly closer than those earlier ones ever had, and that made it worse. More recent circumstances have made it possible for me to tell him about it, finally, and so make moves to get past it. I never wanted to possess him in some creepy way; I just wanted more from him than was currently established. He was very nice about the whole thing, and confirmed that the established boundaries will stand.]

[Boundaries. Boundaries, or the lack thereof, ruined my relationship with John. In my naivete, I believed that he was the one person I could lower all my boundaries with, and it bit us both, hard. Boundaries separate the fuck buddies from the friends with benefits, the newly in Love from the old, established couples.]

[I know these are the rules of the game. I just don't feel the rules in my own bones. I don't understand why love isn't just love: sure, more intense here, less there, but essentially coming from the same place of wanting another's happiness, whether you are the agent or someone else is.]

[Control...it's about harm reduction, about no mixed messages. Just like the law. But it feels false.]

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