A quite obvious realisation occurred to me that came as a surprise: what if the fact of two people loving each other has nothing to do with who they are? What if loving someone is happening in another dimension than one's character, i. e. being lazy, or impatient, or insensitive. Can an insensitive person not love? Can a bitter person not love? What if all the character traits are completely unrelated to being capable of forming a loving relationship? What if forming a loving relationship does not require changing one's character? I know it's kind of obvious but it really wasn't for my subconsciousness. I look at couples and some of them look happy and some of them I wonder how they can stand each other. But what I see has nothing to do with the relationship but everything to do with the individual people. It's all about how well those individuals can present themselves to their social circles, but it tells nothing about the quality of their relationship. So many people put on a well crafted mask when interacting with others. What makes me think that the masks I see on the faces of the couples is how they appear to each other when they're alone with each other?
I think it's the effect of not having seen what love is as a child. Of not having had the right example. Lacking such reference a person goes through life trying to find hints about how love looks like. What do they find? Dumb movies and other people trying to appear like a happy couple to others. If you didn't experience love from the insider's view, you stay an outsider, and it's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what is visible outside is all that there is.
I was visiting my friend and for the first time I met her bf. I thought that I could not be with someone like that and so many things I found unacceptable. But then I got it - it's the way she is, it's the way he is. In a way their annoying features fit each other. Nothing to do with whether they love each other. It's just happening on another plane. A partner is not a laptop I buy that should have all the features that I want. It's more like a country I move into. It's the way the other person is, and it's on me to either adapt or leave. It's not the emotional dependency and adjustment that holds people together, it is exactly the feeling that is between them.
Somehow I knew all those things but I did not really understand them till now. It seems that in a relationship people have far less close to each other than I thought. They're not an extension of each other, they're separate entities with separate identities. It's a similar thinking shift that is needed to understand the strategy design pattern in programming. When I design an class that will use the strategy I don't need to control the strategy implementation. It's enough to trust that it will do what it's supposed to do. I don't need to care about how it will do it. It's enough to know that that this person loves you, it's not required to control how them loving you will appear. Observing love from outside I put too much meaning on things that are not so relevant in the end, while completely missing the important things.