Love, Even If Battles Are Fought, Is Not A War

Love, even if battles are fought, is not a war. Although there are confrontations, the other is never the enemy. That other can be you, when you scold yourself for having screwed up. That other, in this case another, may be the person who sleeps with you. He steals your sheets and takes away little by little and without concealment the terrain that corresponds to you under all the layers of clothing with which you try to protect yourself from the cold.

A fight as icy as it is an accomplice, which feeds on sharing hopes and dreams. Also nightmares, despair and failures. Because thus, from sharing, complicity is born. A complicity that allows battles, but not wars.

The path to perfect empathy

Battles in which not everything goes. The tickles always, the caresses too. Grudge is a pistol that jams. It is forgiven and forgotten. It is deleted and new accounts are made. And if they don’t add up, one, as a last gesture, gives reason, knowing that having that hand, no matter how powerful, is not the best. Aces poker is really about the other not getting hurt. Thus, before the last blow, logic kneels and thanks.

Be grateful to have the other. Count on him. As much as sometimes we have the feeling that he does not understand us and that we form with him a perfect tower of Babel. It happens with our partners, but also with our parents, friends or children. However empathetic we are, the perfect exercise is impossible.

They can’t do it, but neither can we. Yes, we do not, although we have the feeling that sometimes we touch it with the tips of our fingers. That our effort is great in this sense does not assure us of achieving it. To think that we succeeded is a mirage as sincere as water pouring out of the desert sands.

So… when we don’t get it. At least when we fail to do so with an acceptable amount of error (the other does not succeed with an acceptable amount of error) we are not guilty (not guilty). Effort influences the result, opens more and better possibilities, brings you closer to honesty, but rarely ensures a result.

And how many battles that threaten war are born from the feeling that the other does not make an effort? How fragile our memory is to remember the times the other person was attentive. The same red pen – which we sometimes use to write rulings – is the same one that then signs our sentence. The one who builds brick by brick that obstacle that will end up being definitive. That is when communication breaks down and love dissolves into routine like sugar in coffee. Slowly, but hard to stop.

The wounds of war are deep, often fatal

Because recovering love when war has been declared is a very difficult task. The other becomes the enemy, someone to defeat and dominate. Many at this point think that everything will end when he raises his arms, but then there will probably be nothing left. The previously fertile territory will now be arid and unprotected. Everything will have been valid and no one wants to continue playing with someone who cheats, no one wants someone who reminds them of the worst of them. On one side or the other, loser or loser, that break will have been produced by actually shooting with closed eyes, by threatening with the loaded pistol.

For forgetting that a solid love is still delicate and fragile at the same time.

Strong, but sensitive.

Because when love turns into war, that love breaks, tears and becomes a sharp, incandescent brand, capable of breaking us into very small pieces. That is why it is so important not to shoot first, or to make paper wet the statement that the other gives us. Then we can decide to go on and build, or break the relationship, but better not choose to destroy ourselves, because ultimately and selfishly the ones who will end up drowning will be us, in our own pain.