Love or the strength of confidence

(this is the transcription of the video entitled "¿Qué es el amor?" posted in Spanish a couple of months ago)


To lose one’s fear to make mistakes. When one loses his fear to make mistakes, he’s free. This is redemption: mercy. When the man is conscious that there is mercy, that there is redemption, and he consequently breaks with the last fortress of freedom –which is that of provoking fear- and loses his fear for his own mistakes, then man is free, and here is when I believe that he makes the best out of himself.

Usually, when you speak of love people start having a different concept of it, which is a romantic notion of love as a feeling, an emotion…, and it is these expectation that lead to a permanent failure, because this is not love. This is not love. Love is a decision of the will, to love is ‘wanting to love’, and if I don’t make up my mind for love, then I will never love; and ‘wanting to love’ is taking the decision of the will of loving someone; what does this mean? This means to insist on making that person happy: but this needs to be decided upon, this does not rouse spontaneously, brought by heaven, this is not something I feel as a sudden musk which moves me and takes me… no, this is a firm and permanent decision of the will. And I do believe in this love.

I love because I feel attracted to it, obviously. I don’t love against my tastes, it doesn’t mean that love is going against my liking or my appetite, but rather the opposite: because I like, I love and take the decision; because I feel like I do it and take the decision to do it, but this is voluntary, it is not a man’s spontaneous movement.

I think that of ‘the man of my life’, ‘the woman of my life’… is a downright piece of nonsense. I don’t think there is someone specific waiting; I personally find this conception to be stupid, isn’t it? Because anybody with an average experience of life understands that he/she can fall in love with many people, and with each of them he/she will say: ‘she’s the woman of my life’, ‘he’s the man of my life’, but this lasts a month, and next month he/she considers that she was not the woman of his life. Therefore, one can fall in love with thousands of people, with as many as one decides to fall in love, actually: one is predisposed to fall in love and he/she does, this is very easy, isn’t it? Well then, does the man or the woman of the life exist? He/she exists when you finish your life with this person and have done a common life project and one of the two leaves, then the remaining part can say: he/she was truly the woman/man of my life.

Napoleon said that falling in love was a state of fleeting stupidity, and it does have some of that: a state of fleeting stupidity, because it is a moment. Probably it can be a moment of love, but only a moment in larvish state; falling in love is the most selfish thing there is: ‘falling in love’ (in Spanish enamoramiento, meaning “within-love, towards me”, kind of looking into onelself). Well, if one does not overcome this stage of silly falling in love –which probably is very beautiful and provokes great sensations in who suffers it J- , because of its own fleeting nature, and stays within a pure ‘falling in love’ and in what this story makes me feel, without being open to the other person, then this is doomed to the failure, isn’t it? And if one has the expectations of living in love (in this sense) all his life, he’s going to make a mistake. And then he will have a feeling of failure, because his expectations will not have been fulfilled: because he has not loved, he has fallen in love, and he has wanted to live in love in this silly, captivating sense of life. And so it happens: this is not love, those are not the expectations one has to have in order not to give rise to this frustration. I think here lies a big part of the existing frustration, in the fact that people have certain expectations because they have seen much cinema; many films are watched, and in films this seems to be the ideal situation, and this has been sold as the perfect, magnificent, extraordinary situation… but this does not exist.

What it seems quite heroic to me is marriage, I think it is an amazing, really difficult thing, only for the chosen ones, isn’t it? The rest of us who are not the chosen ones spend our time doing other things and forget about marriage, which we find too much for our strength. Because I find it is an amazing thing the fact that your happiness will depend on someone else whom you cannot control because he/she is free. And this happens to all people married, with children…, since having your child sick implies a loss, a drawback you cannot avoid, and not only having your child sick but also his/her being disobedient: these are sleepless nights, worries, a state of tremendous restlessness… and much generosity is needed for this, of course; much generosity to understand that my happiness will be dependent on other people upon whom I have no real power, you know? And I think this is heroic; really, heroic, I think it is something amazing.

To update this decision of making the other person happy, in order to be able to take off the anxiety of minding your own happiness, which I think is the wonderful part of marriage: being able to relieve the task of making yourself happy. Moreover, this making yourself happy is –by the way- such a difficult task, isn’t it? Searching one’s own happiness… We all have the experience that it is much easier to make other person happy than making oneself happy. If at a certain moment in my life I can say “well, I already forget about making myself happy, because there is another person in whom I absolutely trust who will be taking after this, as well as I will be taking care of making this other person happy, which is far easier than making myself happy. This is the most wonderful part, and this is maybe the muscle, isn’t it? To say that the aim of my life is to make this other person happy.