I like to ask questions. Lots of questions. Questions on every topic, even the ones that most people avoid. Especially when starting new relationships–platonic, romantic, or otherwise.
I despise the “getting to know you” process, the relationship purgatory, the friendship limbo. The period of time when you’ve just started to engage with someone past the in-class, coworker, etc. acquaintanceship. I hate the constant tiptoeing, trying to find the boundaries, trying to find the lines you’re not supposed to cross. I hate the trying to figure out if they’re as interested in being involved with you as you are with them, or waiting to see if they do something problematic to mess things up. I hate the discomfort, the lack of real intimacy. I hate it so much because all I want is to feel that comfort, that intimacy that comes with established relationships, that comes with knowing things about each other, things that take the relationship to levels previously unknown. The only quick way to surpass the discomfort of the getting to know you process is to ask questions, and to ask lots of them.
One of my favorites to ask, to those who have made it to the farthest, is:
What does being in love feel like to you?
I love this question for many reasons. It’s a question that’s personal, intimate. Love, despite being a seemingly widespread phenomenon, is something experienced so differently by every individual. How love was presented to you as a child, what forms of affection mean the most to you, what aspects of life–and of relationships– you value most… all these can be factors in the way someone experiences love. And so, having the way someone feels love described to you is so telling of who they are at their core, and that’s not something we, as humans, often let other humans be privy to.
It’s a question that forces someone to describe something seemingly indescribable. Like describing a color to someone that can’t see, or the taste of meat to someone who’s never tried it, grief to a child who has only just begun to grasp the concept of death. It’s so interesting to see the gears turning as someone tries to find the words to describe this socially constructed phenomenon that still somehow means so much and is so very real to us. It’s so intriguing to watch the concentration and frustration behind someone’s eyes, the furrowing of there brow as they think: “How does being in love feel to me?”
But most significant of the reasons I love this question is that it forces me, for a moment, to examine the way that I feel love, what it says of me the way that I experience it, how it measures up to the way my new companion feels love.
How does being in love feel to me?
It starts with an urge. A desire to say it out loud:
I love you.
A desire that I swiftly ignore whenever it comes about because “it’s too soon to feel that, you’re just getting excited” because “if you say it now they won’t say it back, it’s too soon to expect that of them” and because “falling in love doesn’t happen this fast.”
But then the urge becomes more frequent, more demanding. Every time I see them the words are itching to leap off my tongue, I become love drunk in their presence, so tipsy on affection that I am out of control of my faculties and could say something stupid, premature at any moment. However, fear and learned distrust of my emotions keeps me from doing so.
And then, finally, there is a moment, a singular, magnificent moment of euphoria so great, so Earth shatteringly grand, that I am forced to accept that yes:
I love you.
