Some people find it very easy to say “I love you”. “I love you” is not just a simple sentence as it may seem to be. The phrase “I love you” is the key to one’s heart, it opens the gates of the heart, chases away everything which might have been there and plants the seeds of a passionate, strange… inexplicable feeling… that connects human beings always and forever to eternity. But, what I personally find very uncommon is our inability to understand what “I love you” is really. Basically it means that “I”, as a human being, have a certain feeling towards “you” another human being. How strange it looks especially that the phrase “I love you” , even basically, does not include any clues of the other person towards him/her I have that feeling feels it back towards me or not. Here we come to conclude that love is having that feeling toward a specific person regardless if that person feels the same thing back towards you or not. Let us start with the subject and the object of love (the object and the subject of love are interchangeable in a true love). “I” means basically “me”. But who am “I”? Here comes the question of identity. I may say I am this existing entity you can see in front of you, I am what no one is except me. One may say that I am the sum total of my ideas, my beliefs, my race, my religion, my society, my culture, my ethnicity, my education, my language,….but am I really so?. For me, I am not. I am me. Why? Because when I was born, for example, I had none of those things which some people who think that they think say that they make me up. So I am “me” from the very first moment I came to this life. If, then, “I” is understood like this “you” too is the same. “you” is you just like the way “I” is , a human being after all. Moreover even if man loses all of the properties I have mentioned, he can still be himself, so none of those properties contribute to make me who I really am and to make you who you really are. Going back to “I love you” term explanation, I am always surprised when a girl tells a boy or a boy tells a girl “I love you” and then soon as he/she discovers that he belongs to a different ethnicity, race, religion, ….ceases to love him/her. I am sorry to say that the feeling you feel toward the other person in this case can be termed infatuation… but not love. Or instead of saying “I love you”, you say “I love you to be like me or to be the one who goes with the conditions I have in my mind. And if you are looking for the other to be like you, or to fulfill your conditions, it is no way, I advise you to begin a reflexive love story between you and yourself or you take a deep sleep and meet the one who can be the sum total of what your conditions entail. To love a person is to love him/her unconditionally just the way he/she is and whatsoever he/she believes and thinks and speaks…because he/she is he not the sum total of other external circumstances as some people hypothesized it.
Human beings are beings, not just existing entities. What is “to be” and what is “to exist”?? to be means you have the possibility to become what you are not, at this level I can say that I am not the person you talked to last year because that person wears a very short dress and now wears a very long one, so this is another person, so, now I become what I was not in the past. A stone, on the other hand, is just a stone, it is a stone one year before, now, and next year it will just be a stone, it is not possible for it to become what it is not. It is what it is only and ever. Therefore humans be and exist and a stone just exists. The point from this is that we are dynamic socially (we can move from one society to another), culturally (we can adopt new cultures), linguistically(we can speak new languages), religiously (we can convert to other religions)... In a nutshell, we can be what we are not. If you tell me that I no longer love you because I speak a different language, or I belong to a different ethnicity, or because I have a different religion, you are implicitly making me an object thinking that I am not a being but just an existing entity because you are precluding any possibility for me to be what I am not. In short, “I love you” is you love me the way I am, not the way you want me to be and if that is the case leave me alone and look for you in someone else, because I am “me” and I cannot just be “you” or someone else other than me.
by Amazigh Adguikh (Mohammed) my beloved <3
