Ten-Finger Exercises

Love and Like

I wrote an essay last week about love, called "Show, Don't Tell." Tonight I'm thinking about an old idea of mine, about liking people.

Loving is the most excellent, because it requires a person to put the other's needs before their own. Granted, it can't be entirely one-sided if a relationship is to last, but that's still the ideal.

Tor wrote a blog last week about friends. He asked if we consider our on-line friends "friends" in the same way we think about our in-person friends. ( He managed to make a much more sensible sentence out of it though.) There were many responses, and I think they all said yes, they're just the same. I didn't answer, because I don't know the answer.

I know much more about my 3-D friends, the ones I see in the flesh, whose bad moods I've heard as well as good, whose body language I've read as well as the words they say. In some ways I know them better, at least the close friends. In some ways it's probably easier to know my blogging friends even better though, because we do express some deep thoughts and feelings that might not ever come up in the flesh.

"Liking," as opposed to "loving," usually comes in second best, and I think it's unfair. Unless, of course, we're talking about the dozens or hundreds of people we call friends, people we like. I like most people, in that way. Seldom does someone just rub me the wrong way. But to really like someone, to be so interested in who they are and so compatible that you always have something to talk about, like "best friends" when I was a girl, well, that's rare and unusual to me.

Maybe that's just me. I can and do make small talk with plenty of people every day; but how often do I tell someone that I'm a writer and have them ask what I write? Hardly ever.
And if they do, all the answer they want is whether I'm writing a book; or, "oh, poetry."

Maybe it's having the great blessing and luxury of being loved that makes me sometimes wish for more. Is that right, Mr. Maslow? (I enjoyed Mavis Moog 's recent short plays in her blog.)

And what could be more? To be liked, appreciated, enjoyed, delighted in. I don't think those are quite the same as loved, do you?