Do I Really Love You

Do I Really Love You

Author

Kim Hye-nam

Publisher

Gallion | Published 2007-12-14

Category

Poetry/Essay

Book description

A healing essay on love by psychoanalyst Kim Hye-nam. This book is about love...

It had been about the third time Kyung-hwan-hyung asked me to bring him Alain de Botton's 'Essays in Love,' and I almost lost track of it, but fortunately I had asked him beforehand to post it on my Facebook feed, so I saw it and didn't forget to bring Alain de Botton's book! At the same time, I ended up bringing this book too. Hmm... rather than saying I brought it for some special reason, I'd say it's just an extension of the 'love'-related books I've been reading lately. Books like 'Psychology Talks About Romance' (which I lent to my girlfriend for a while; I don't know where it is now), 'The Female Brain,' or 'What on Earth Is a Man Thinking?' Actually, it might be because lately I've started pondering love again and am thinking seriously about my future career. Since it's a book I've read once before, I didn't read it as frantically as last time, but it's true that it helped me calmly organize my feelings.

As my relationship with my girlfriend went through danger, gradually feeling that the ground hardens after the rain, living while thinking differently than before still feels awkward. Having more thoughts means time has started to pass slowly, and lately time doesn't pass well and my stray thoughts won't sort themselves out but cluster together in a tangle, so I'm agonizing over how I can untangle them. One of those worries is love, and the other you could say is my career path. While reading this book, I kept looking back and wondering whether I really love my girlfriend, or whether I'm trying to feel 'narcissism' by projecting my own image through her, or whether I'm trying to see the image of my parents in her.

In the past, I read this book in a state of complete ignorance, that is, having paused from dating and not keeping the feeling of 'love' in my heart, so rather than feeling any emotion while reading it, I read it to acquire knowledge and understand myself. But now, reading it with my relationship with my girlfriend in mind, it seems I see somewhat different things, things like my attitude toward this relationship and the judgments I make about my girlfriend, and so on.

Everyone has probably heard the story of the 'primeval man' at least once. The story goes that the first humans had four arms, four legs, and two sets of genitals, and when these humans kept threatening the gods, Zeus split them in two, and as a result the being called human came to wander in search of its different 'other half.' The reason love is described as the process of finding one's other half is probably because we so often see people searching in others for what they themselves lack. I too belong to the somewhat strange category of men, and because of that strangeness, perhaps it's the result of searching in a partner for the bit of masculinity I lack that I came to meet someone like my current girlfriend. Assigning meaning to one's own relationship oneself may be dangerous, but I personally have a very interesting stance toward this relationship, saying to myself, where in the world is there a couple like us.

The author describes 'love' in three stages. The first stage is 'falling in love.' When starting love with someone, we often use the expression 'falling in love.' Everyone knows that the expression 'love at first sight' usually refers to falling in love. The second stage is 'being in love,' which means each turning the direction of their life and slowly aligning each one's energy in one direction. The third is 'staying in love,' which means not isolating the loving relationship from the outside world but enduring within it. I am somewhere within the second and third stages: the period of falling in love and seeing nothing but her has passed somewhat (that doesn't mean the passion is gone; rather, every time I encounter this feeling of passion that seems to have revived after going into the military, I can't erase it, which is very sad and a worry). Having reached the stage of wanting to stay in love, my concern is how I can include the person named 'Lee Yoon-a' in the design of my life. When I told my father I wanted to study the liberal arts for about a year after discharge rather than going abroad to study right away, he asked whether it was because of my girlfriend. I couldn't honestly say 'yes.' If I had, he would have told me there are women everywhere in the world so don't get attached, but because I feel that a 'stable state' like the one I have now is good, I didn't want to deliberately make another relationship and make things hard for myself. To do that, I think I need to study and spend about a year together, which is why I said what I said.

I still don't really know the feeling of 'staying in love.' But I can understand that it's different from falling in love. When I think about how it's been nearly a year since I started pondering my future here, and the things I'm practicing to concretely settle these worries and put them into action, I can understand it on my own. Vaguely, my body knows it. It's hard to say what kind of feeling it is. My verbal expressiveness falls short. Still, I think people who know this feeling will empathize even if I can't put it into words.

Love is a state in which 'Eros (desire)' and 'Psyche (soul)' are wholly united. In love, these two aspects are so equally important that one cannot say either is more important than the other. Because uniting emotionally and physically is one of the most ecstatic experiences given to humanity.

Like this part the author wrote in reaching the book's conclusion, I too don't want to call love simply 'platonic love.' Rather, I want to ask how on earth anyone could say 'platonic love' is the best. I want to criticize spiritual love as merely something people do because they don't want to soil and make ugly their love by connecting it with 'desire.' I would say they do it because when they meet in person and talk, it ruins the 'platonic love' they had built only through letters.

The ideal love I envision is a union of mind and action, in other words, the head and the heart becoming one. I think the 'love' I envision cannot be achieved with reason or emotion alone, with only one of the two. You must be able to be warm reason, and you must be able to be cold emotion. People usually say cold reason and warm emotion dominate, but I think it's right to run a relationship while also considering the opposite case.

Looking back on myself, I have a very strong dependent tendency (the fact that I'm like this even though I don't want to be could be said to mean the wounds of childhood haven't been properly healed... from a psychoanalytic perspective, that is), and I could feel that after being together and then being alone, I would miss the other person terribly for about a day before gradually getting better. Someone's advice to marry only when you have no problem being alone is very valid and correct advice. Because if you marry when you feel like you'll die without the other person, that household begins by carrying the risk of falling apart.

My girlfriend's and my second anniversary is coming up, and I'm wondering what I should do to look back on the time we've shared. I want to look back and talk about each thing one by one, and talk about how we've grown, and I want to have a time to heal wounds and look back on our relationship.