Romantic Love? What is it? Do I need it? Do I already have it?

Okay, I have a zillion things I should be doing right now, but no desire to do any of them. Strangely, I have a desire to write, but little to say. I’m feeling speechless? Dear goodness, something must be wrong in the universe!

Anyhoo, I’ve been struggling lately with the concept of romantic love. What is romantic love exactly? I think the whole thing that spurred it is that I have a friend who seemingly divides sex into two categories. Sex for physical gratification and sex combined with romantic love. I’ve never heard him make reference to any category above, below, or in-between. For some reason, this caused me to go back and view my sexual history and what I came up with surprised me. I have never really had sex strictly for physical gratification and I’ve never really had it on a purely romantic level. Then in what context have I had it exactly? Well, it’s odd, but I’ll try and describe it.

I’ve genuinely cared on some level for every person I’ve slept with, but I’ve never desired that person to one day become my partner, my spouse, or the father of my children. They’re sort of like a good friend that I also find sexually attractive in some way. Is that romantic love? Or is that a physical expression of friendship? Unlike the typical relationship, I have remained friends with all of my former partners after the sexual or romantic aspect has ended. The one exception would be my first boyfriend, but the reason we don’t talk anymore is not because we aren’t friends. When he proposed to his now wife her acceptance was qualified on the condition that he end his communication with me. She found our friendship odd and couldn’t understand why a former couple would still be speaking to each other unless something was still there. The irony is that I am probably the last person on earth she would need to worry about in regards to stealing her husband. He’s a great guy, but people break up for a reason.

As for the others, I hear from them fairly regularly. In the past week one has forwarded me pictures of his new house while another has sent me Chuck Norris jokes. Most people think this is strange. Frankly, I can’t imagine having a relationship that exceeds friendship, but one day just ceases. When I stop to think about it, even my close female friends with whom I have had a split or disagreement have usually returned to some level of friendship. Sometimes the friendship is on a lower level than before; other times it’s stronger.

I’m often confused when people attempt to define the feeling of love to me. Frankly, it doesn’t sound that attractive. Words I often hear are: insanity, craziness, passion, high-highs/low lows, longing, deprivation, ecstasy, consuming, overwhelming, overriding emotion? Nice motivators, yes. But on an every day basis? I’d want to throw myself off a cliff in a dramatic fashion several times a week! My past relationships aren’t like that – they’re like good friendships with an additional bond.

Am I missing something? The unquestionable answer from my peers is yes. But wait a second….doesn’t passion and romantic love fade? Then what are you left with? No sex and a person you can’t stand to be around? Is this a good theory on which to base a partnership? Then again, are you missing out on the true joys of life if you forgo the drama? I’m all for living life to the fullest, but where does passion end and masochism take over?

Of course, the perfect situation would be to find a passionate love with someone who you also just enjoy being with. Someone who has a similar outlook on life, similar goals and similar interests. Someone who pushes you just enough to go that extra mile, but doesn’t push you over the edge. To that I say, I’m still looking. (Of course, my definition of looking means thinking – which may or may not mean progress.)

The search for a guy was so much easier in the early twenties when I had so little life experience to go on. Remember in college when your basic qualities for a significant other were looks, brain, and the ability to get a decent job? The good old days, indeed! Now when I think of what I want in a partner I ask, is this the person I want to see first thing when I wake up every morning, every day, for the rest of my life?!? Would he be serious enough? Would he be silly enough? Would we fight about the mortgage? Could I stand to walk into the bathroom every morning and see the glob of toothpaste he’d left in the sink? Would he know to do the little incidental things to keep our relationship sane? Would he even try to figure them out? Would his behavior drive me up the wall? Would we see eye-to-eye on most things? If not, would we discuss it? Would he listen to what I had to say and value my opinion? Would I show the same respect for him? The more I think about it, the more complex it gets.

Plus, can you really find all of this in one person? Is your partner really your truest friend? I know plenty of women in different situations where their husband is neither their closest friend, nor the person they confide in, nor the person who supports them in their moment of need. They find that in other places and they seem generally happy. Could I be that way too? God, I hope not. Either I’m a diehard romantic at heart or really naive.

What is it about the terms partner and lover that seem incompatible? In a partner you want stability and consistency. In a lover you want creativity, spontaneity. Are the two mutually exclusive? Again I ask, can you get all of this in one person? Right now I have close to the perfect man. What? That’s right folks. I have a found a man whom I feel passionately about. I have found one who offers stimulating conversation and the ability to look at things differently. I have found the perfect companion with whom to spend a lazy day. I have found someone who respects me and listens to my words. I’ve found verve in the bedroom.

There’s just one problem. He’s not one man. More like a small handful. They are all wonderful in their own way. Some of their characteristics overlap. All of them make me laugh – though they are different even in that aspect. The humor ranges from scatological to intellectual to slapstick. I can say that I love every single one of them. Is it a romantic love? Uh, see the above subject line. Do they love me? On some level I suppose they do. Certainly none of them have broached the subject of conventional dating or behaved in a way to indicate to me that they are interested in something more than the current relationship. I can think of two who regularly tell me that they love in some fashion or another. One says it in a believable manner, but our affection is not of the romantic variety. The other uses it in a context that leads me to assume that it’s more like they love spending time with me or love the experiences that they have with me.

A different friend regularly tells me that he has no greater affection for me, but even that is puzzling. For example, the other day he told me that FYI, most guys don’t appreciate it when you talk about another guy in their presence, but that it was okay if I did it around him. He wasn’t bothered by it because he didn’t care. He just wanted to let me know so I would be aware of it, but again, not a problem with him because he didn’t care. I think he said he didn’t care three or four times. This conversation came on the heels of me talking about another guy – a discussion I’d started because, well, I didn’t think he cared – at least until he started repeating it like a broken record.

Whether their behavior is due to the fact that they are happy with the status quo or in reaction to my own behavior is up for grabs. I mean really, how does one react to, “I love you! And him and him and him?” Certainly this behavior would lead some to believe that my affection is less than sincere or at the very least confusing. But it’s not insincere and it also isn’t indicative of a lower level of affection. If they’re all on the level of friend love it’s because I’ve never had any reason to believe that they prefer something other than that. Would I behave differently if one of them said something? I would like to think so. At the same time, I’m pretty happy with my situation. With a few exceptions, I feel like I have it all.

But sometimes I wonder if I’m fooling myself. Just as I don’t belong to these men, they don’t belong to me. Then again, I’ve never wanted to have exclusive rights to a person and I certainly have never wanted to offer my own up for contract. So does this mean that I am actually alone? I never feel truly alone. I have some really good friends, but I am also my own best friend. If no one wants to lend an ear, offer a thought, or go to a movie, I am there for me. So, am I self-evolved or just self-absorbed?

If it wasn't reality, it would be really funny...

Me: Do you realize how condescending that sounds?
Him: You seem to be using that line a lot tonight. Do you think you have some type of issue where you think people perceive you as non-intellectual?
Me: Actually, I’m starting to think that condescension/pretentiousness may be an accidental quality in myself so I have a heightened sensitivity to it right now. But now that you mention it, yes, I have had an issue with being perceived as less intelligent than I am, particularly in relation to the men I’ve dated.
Him: Well, you shouldn’t feel insecure about it because you've exhibited enough in conversation with me to indicate that you are in fact, intellectual.
Me (thinking): That line exemplifies the condescension and pretentiousness of which I earlier spoke.

Am I missing something?

Have you ever noticed how it's perfectly normal for a guy with whom you're tangentially involved to talk about other women, but then when you start talking about other men they get quiet and you feel awkward. Why is that?

Who says getting older is a bad thing?

Ok, so as some of you know, I got in a car wreck during the last week of class in the fall. For my folly, I was awarded with a $250 traffic ticket, $500 deductible towards the repair of my car (which was touch and go for awhile because the insurance company wasn’t sure that my car was worth repairing), and a call from my insurance company telling me that my insurance would definitely be going up next term due to the fact that the accident was my fault and they were paying for the repair of my car as well as the person I hit. (Actually, I was stopped and she hit me, but…semantics.)

The outcome of all of this:
1. I pay the extra $20 or so on my insurance for rental car coverage so while my car was out of commission for two weeks, I didn’t end up having to pay more than about $7 a day for the rental car.
2. After sending out an appraiser, the insurance company decided that I had taken good care of my car and it was actually worth above the blue book value – hence they would pay to repair it.
3. I went to court and got the traffic ticket dismissed on a technicality.
4. My insurance renewal came in the mail the other day listing that my insurance was changing due to the wreck. Ya-ya, I flipped through the pages trying to determine just how bad it was. When I finally found the price, my insurance had actually gone down by about $100 every six months. What? I flipped through a little more and as it turns out, I got a ‘longevity reduction.’ Sweet. Let me get this straight. Because I’m old I now get to pay less on my insurance even though I got in a wreck?!? I’ll take that.

More tax law fun...

So the bad news is...if you embezzle $, you still need to report it on your taxes. Unfortunately, this may make it easier for you to be caught as whoever you embezzle from is probably not reporting it in their return. The good new is, should you be found and have to return the money, you may take a deduction on it after you have paid the income tax. Who says taxes aren't fair? And who says Tax law is boring? Breast implants? Crooks? Scintillating!

Things I think about when I should be studying...

Eating at Chick-Fil-A has always held somewhat of a values struggle for me.

First off, the love:
1. I think they may have the best tasting fast food out there (excluding In-n-Out).
2. I like it that they are closed on Sundays in order to give there employees a regularly scheduled day off to spend time with family (albeit religious related or what-not).
3. They give their employees college scholarships.
4. They give $ to causes related to kids and education.
5. The employees are nice and the service is typically better than your average fast food restaurant.
6. I like the ice cream, too.

Now, the not-so-love:
1. Last time I checked, their entire executive staff was comprised of white males, the majority of whom listed in their bio that were involved in some kind of church denomination with fundamental leanings…Because we all know that Atlanta has a relatively low population of qualified women and minorities.
2. They changed the name of the Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl to the Chick-Fil-A Bowl…way to ruin tradition in an effort to get more bang for your buck.
3. My little sister once got a kids meal there where the prize was bible-related…Whoever heard of paying to be proselytized?
4. My mom once attended a state PTA convention where the founder spoke. His opening words were (paraphrasing), “The first thing we need to do is get prayer back in school.” (Way to separate church and state! Whoo-hoo!)
5. Most importantly, every time I buy a Chick-Fil-A sandwich I have a sneaking suspicion that part of my money is being diverted to some anti-choice organization and I am in effect paying to lose the rights to my own body.

This actually has nothing to do with the point of my entry. Since I started law school I have steadily been gaining weight. (For those of you not familiar with the paranoia I have held since the age of 14, steadily = around 5 pounds.) I discovered a few days ago that this has placed me over the median healthy weight for age/height range. However, I am still in the ‘healthy’ range. My friends have tried to tell me that this is just a natural part of getting older and now that I am in my thirties, I should expect to weigh a little more. My response is, “Yeah, if I’d had two small children by this point like the ‘average’ person! This information, coupled with the fact that I have gained approximately 17 pounds in the last five years has me feeling a little blimp-like as of late. (According to my friends I was ‘freakishly’ thin five years ago – though I never thought so despite bouts of insomnia, feeling ridiculously lethargic, experiencing a regular lack of ability to focus/concentrate and having a friend try at least every other day to induce me to eat something. Seriously. They’d be like, we’ll go do this fun thing as soon as you eat that cookie and I’d be like, “Wow. Thanks for speaking to me like I’m two years old. That is a really effective method you’ve got there." My argument was that I never weighed less than 100 pounds – of course, at my lowest I was weighing myself with shoes on after two glasses of water at the end of the day and oh yeah, I may have adjusted the scale just the tiniest bit....Oh criminy, this just caused me to realize that I may have actually gained more than 17 pounds.)

In an effort to prevent additional weight gain I decided to revert back to an old standard that I started in high school, but dispensed with in recent years: the list. Every day I have to make a list of every thing that I eat and the corresponding calorie count. I will say it works. However, you can get obsessive about it pretty quickly. So Chick-Fil-A…I had it for lunch today. Didn’t get fries because I would have to put it on the list. Opted for the fried version instead of the grilled to prove to myself that I wasn’t being psycho about the whole list thing – then didn’t dip it in ketchup because that’s 25 points for the list. Back in high school I could tell you the calorie count of just about everything, but since I dropped the list I’m not as up on that as I used to be. So, when I got done with eating I sat down at my computer and looked it up. Holy cow. Did you know that a Chick-Fil-A sandwich has 410 calories, 16 grams of fat and 38 carbs? That’s more than a cheeseburger from McD! (I know. I looked that up too to compare.) At least the sandwich does have twice the protein of the cheeseburger, but still! I’m convinced the sandwich has got be healthier on some level. But Ana, you say, 410 calories is really not that much! …but it seems like a lot to me…and that’s the problem with keeping the list.

Sophomore Slump

So I seem to be going through a little lull lately. If you ever go to law school, I highly recommend not visiting your professors after the first semester to review your exam. You will find out that you received the grade you did, not because you did anything incorrect, but rather because, every professor grades his exam differently and prefers a different format…not that any of them indicate to you in advance what these factors are….

For example, in my Contracts class, I talked about everything and the kitchen sink. The class average on the main essay was 56 points. My score was 115. On the other hand, my torts professor apparently only wanted issues that were inherently obvious and were clearly successful. Thus, when I met my Torts prof to go over the exam he told me that I had hugely wasted my time for thinking outside the box and including arguments that might not be won. The proper technique for him would be to go into greater discussion on the main issues. This method would have killed my grade in Contracts or CivPro. Despite not condoning outside the box thinking, my prof did take part in outside the box grading.

On our Torts exam, we had one long hypo followed by a multiple choice section. The hypo was approx three pages long with a fourth page discussing research already done by another associate. The fourth page largely dealt with issues of negligence and product liability while the first few pages primarily covered intentional torts. As it turns out, a substantial number of people somehow missed the fourth page and did not write on it at all – rather interesting since the page fell in the middle of the exam. At any rate, instead of grading all the exams as is, my prof took out the exams of those who had clearly missed the fourth page and graded them separately. His rationale was that some people had made great arguments on the issues they discussed and he didn’t think that they should be penalized for such. Well, duh, if you have nearly three hours to write on virtually nothing more than intentional torts, you should have the time to put together a pretty fantastic argument that far surpasses the exams of those who used the same amount of time to include discussions of negligence and products liability. Unfortunately for me, I read the exam thoroughly, discussed all the issues and ended up with a grade lower than my other two classes that basically sunk my GPA. A friend of mine had an even more obscene fate. She didn’t see the fourth page until ten minutes before the exam ended and wrote a quick outline of the issues. When she met with the prof he told her that she would have received a higher grade if she had just not written about the fourth page at all. Does anyone else see the problem with this or is it just me? Talk about genius.

Yeah, so why this may be an isolated incident, I will admit that it has caused me to take on somewhat of a ‘why bother’ attitude. This was revealed in full force last Saturday when I gave an oral argument for my legal writing class. We’d had this assignment for three weeks, but for some reason the class didn’t seem to get clear instructions until the Thursday prior. The project involved researching an issue and discussing it for ten minutes in appellate argument format. Because the issue was something we had not yet learned, the research took forever. I should also mention that the presentation was not for a grade. Despite having writing/research assignments due each week, we are only graded on a final appellate brief (70%) and one hour test (30%) which gives you a ‘who cares’ attitude about the other stuff when you’re trying to stay caught up in your other classes.

Anyhoo, given the last minute instructions on Thursday combined with general disgust towards the whole set-up I did not have the best attitude in regards to the assignment. Friday I decided to fully redo my research which was oh so fun since I ended up being sick that day. I managed to get it done and met with my partner the night before to go over our arguments. Mine were a little choppy, but we agreed to meet two hours before the argument the next day in order to tighten things up. Then I overslept and barely made it to the event. You can imagine how this went.

At the first pause in my argument the ‘judge’ asked me a question that in hindsight was probably designed to get me back on track, but was actually such a stupid question that I got thrown. I tried to explain to the ‘judge’ that I was establishing an element critical to something later in the argument, but then I had to explain that argument. Basically, I was on point 1 and the guy made me skip to point 6 and I only had seven points to begin with. So then I sat there trying to decide whether I should go back and further discuss issues that were critical to the point I had already discussed with the judge. Peeved, I said my final point and sat down.

When I asked my partner exactly how bad it was she described the following behavior. Once when a ‘judge’ asked a question I responded with a laugh. Twice, I held up my hand and waved the judge off when he was asking me something. One comment by the judge was answered with a “whatever”. Then to cap off the argument, when a judge in the middle of asking me a question I replied, “You know what. I think I’m done here,” and sat down. Perhaps I should take a serious look at transactional law.

And let me tell you, I was clearly in a fabulous mood because afterwards the ‘judges’ approached me to ask what went wrong and was I just nervous. “No,” I replied. “I just really don’t care.” Smooth, huh? I was then lectured that even though this was not for a grade, it was still a credit/no credit assignment and they had to determine whether or not I had at least made a good faith effort. I showed them my research as evidence of such. That’s when they told me that the research had nothing to do with it. My ‘good faith’ effort was not based on the merits of my argument, but rather on my form and structure of argument. Huh? “Yes,” they said. Didn’t I realize that the purpose of the legal writing class in general and the basis of my grade had nothing to do with reasoning or thinking, but was instead based on my ability to create an overarching theme that offered a logical conclusion? “Are you kidding me?” I asked. “I can write you something really pretty and formatted, but if it’s not a viable argument then the whole thing is a waste.” To which they replied, “It’s not about how strong your argument is. It’s about how good you look when you present it.” Well that’s genius. As I exited the room one of the judges had the gall to say to me, “Don’t drop out just yet. Give law school a chance.” What the !?!? Who said anything about dropping out? I just didn’t like the assignment. GEEZ!

Mind in gutter...as usual

I just saw an online ad with a picture of a pregnant woman and the words "Make sure he's protected." The ad was for insurance and the phrase referred to the welfare of the woman's future child. I, of course, interpreted the picture a totally different way.

Welcome to Reality...

I have this bad habit of looking at the computer screen of the person next to me in class. Twice this week, someone has had a news article that has caused me to say, "Don't you just love the Onion?" Both times the persons have replied, "It's cnn.com"

Adventures in Tax Law...

I'm sitting in class right now...and I kid you not, this is the discussion we're having.

Under normal circumstances, cosmetic surgery is not considered a deductible medical expense. However, what if a stripper got breast enhancement in conjunction with her profession? Could she then expense the surgery as a business expense? Or, should the surgery be viewed as a capitalized asset and be depreciated? Or is it an investment?

Quirks...

I’ve started an odd habit as of late. My current homestead is without a dishwasher. One night I had an urge for a beer, but I hate drinking it straight out of the can for some reason. I went to grab a new glass, but decided instead to conserve and rinse out a dirty one to save myself the extra cleaning. The only item sitting in the sink was a wine glass.

So now my new thing is to drink my cheap Mexican beer out of wine glass. For some reason I enjoy the sick irony of it. Plus, it’s totally strikes me as a Texan-like thing to do. Who says you can’t enjoy a cold beverage on more than one level?