“I cannot love you like I love myself. I can only love you the way I wish to be loved.”
“Are you saying your love for yourself is different from the way you wish to love yourself?”
“I’m saying how I love myself is fundamentally different from how I wish to be loved.”
“Why can’t they be one and the same?”
“Your question’s logical limit is the ridiculous proposal: Why can’t two persons be the same? They cannot. Even if they are the absolute spitting reflections of each other, in mind and body, cosmically cloned twins, they are two persons occupying two different spatial locations. Demarcated, thus identifiable. There is a boundary between each one’s self and the other. They can be two and the same, but they cannot be one and the same.”
“So can your love for yourself and the love you wish you were given be two and the same?”
“No they can’t. Examine your words. One is an ability, the other a wish. One is my love for myself. The other is a wish for a kind of love that I cannot attain by virtue of being inside myself. I cannot see all of myself from inside. Only parts of it. And that is the extent of my self-love. In verse:
In my temple I kneel and pray, enclosed, alone
Standing Outside, you behold a glorious monument of stone
And even if through these heaven-supporting pillars you peer
You’re deaf to the prayer, only the praying is clear
The unknown part of myself, that part which I cannot access by virtue of being inside myself, becomes impossible to love. It would be a love of vacuum, a vacuum of love, i.e. no love. It can only be done from outside.”
“So the love you wish is really a wish to be seen a certain way?”
“If you look at it that way, this love is no different from loving myself. I would be using my lover as a mere agency for my own self-loving. This is what it means to love being seen a certain way. The love I wish however is that which comes despite being seen a certain way.”
“So you wish to be loved unconditionally then.”
“No. I wish to be loved very conditionally. I wish to be loved for who I am and not loved for loving’s sake. The love I wish is that which permits me to be myself. ”
“But if you wish to be loved for who you are, how can you be sure that who you are merits love?”
“Indeed. I don’t. I never said I deserved love. I’m only expressing a desire for it.”
“Doesn’t this get complicated by the reality of human nature? Don’t you need to love your lover in return? In fact, it is the value of your returned love that produces your lover’s love for you.”
“The reason I love my lover is not because he loves me, but because he is the realization of my ideals. My bent-into-the-shape-of-reality ideals. Imperfect, both him and my love for him. Do I love him because he loves me? That might be the cause, but not the reason.”
“You’re deep.”
“You’re sheep.”
“You’re funny.”
“You most certainly are not.”
“You like to have the last word.”
“I like my words to last.”
“You like word play.”
“I like word sex.”
“And weird sex.”
“Can we go on and on making love?”
“Yes we can.”