Talk:Essays/@comment-4423292-20151216191851

Want and Love
In Spanish class, I just leaned «te quiero». I asked my teacher about it, and she assured me that it just means "I love you", and that there is really no connection to the literal translation, "I want you".

People "wanting" people is a phrase that's sometimes used in English. I've mostly heard it in Game of Thrones, but I think people use it in other contexts too. I actually find it quite charming.

And then I started thinking about a Kimchi Cuddles comic, "I love you and by that I mean…" And I started thinking how most of the time, "I want you" is what "I love you" most accurately means.

There's no reason for "I want you" to mean "I want your body" over "I want your mind". I want you. I want you in my life, I want you next to me, I want you spending time with me. That's why we cry when people leave, even if it's good for them.

We say love is kind. But is that true? Is love really this mystical thing we've built it up to be? Or is it just wanting? Wanting is ok; it's ok to want someone. But it's not kind. Not that it's unkind either, just that kindness doesn't really have anything to do with it at all.

Love is a mixture of, "I want you," and "I care about you," and we think that the more, "I care about you," there is, the purer or truer the love is. Like Jewish parents, who put their kids on trains and sent them away before the Holocaust to protect them.

The concept of true love is a strange one. I don't even know what it means. In order for there to be such thing as true love, if follows that there's also such thing as false love. The words right there in in — somehow false, but still love. What does that look like?