Anthony

Posted Friday, October 20, 2023

6mo

INTJ

8

7

Confession of Love

If you desire and long for someone, you must tell her. Foremost, you owe it to yourself to have the courage to recognize your emotions as justified and legitimate. A man who will not confess his love for a woman is like a man who will not speak to the truth because he fears that others will not agree with him. To share your feelings openly and without apology is the act of taking your emotions and values seriously. But also, there is nothing to be gained by keeping your struggle with your desire locked up inside. You may rationalize the security of not making yourself vulnerable by saying that "Things are good between us, and I don't want to ruin that." Or, you might tell yourself, "It doesn't feel like the right time; the right time will come; I'll tell her then." Neither of these things are valid justifications for your lack of couarge. Let us examine the first. On the premise that if you confessed your feelings your friendship would be damaged, you remain silent and deal with your struggle internally and without expression. Consider what this means. Ask yourself, if you confessed a difficult and emotionally involved problem to your best friend, would you be afraid of what they would respond with. And if so, why? A friendship is based on a foundation of trust and mutual admiration; and if a person truly is a friend, they will care about how you feel and why you feel that way. To confess that you cannot express yourself to another person because it would damage your friendship is to confess that what you possess is not friendship, but a pretense of a friendship which you intend to continue to delude yourself with for fear of establishing a long-lasting and deeper connection with other human beings. As to the second, there is no right time except the present. Once you have decided that you are in love with someone, you can achieve nothing but not expressing it. A confession of love is the taking away of a vail. To hide one's true feelings for another person is only to obscure that vail with a smokescreen. A smokescreen which cannot accomplish closeness but an ever-increasing distance. A distance created by the inconsistency of your seeming excitement about that person and your pretense of not being concerned or bothered. A distance created between that which one can perceive as your actual estimate of their person; and that in your behavior which indicates its opposite. Thus, in biding your time, all you accomplish is to make your behavior bewildering and incomprehensible. To leave the person your have feelings for confused because your behavior and attitude towards them becomes unintelligble. The expression, "The truth shall set you free" is incredibly applicable to the confession of love. When a man does not confess his affection for a woman, he is left tormented by inner uncertainty. Rather than confronting the issue in order to address it openly and honestly, to clarify the air and seek the truth by the only means possible, he sits and dwells on the fantasy of her confessing her love to him, but is never-the-less plagued with inner uncertainty. He makes himself an emotional dependent. He ties his well being to her answer, and makes himself helpless to whatever she might say. He destroys that within him which she could love for the sake of never facing the fear of discovering whether or not she does. In facing the struggle in silence and desperate longing, he makes himself unstable and leaves his emotional state hanging over an abyss which threatens to swallow him and destroy his happiness. He makes himself into a man whom a woman could only pity; and pity cannot properly be a source of a woman's affection. Thus, whatever he does possess that she may fall in love with, he destroys it, for fear of ever finding out how she does or might feel. He makes himself the victim of his own torture, and increases his own anxiety about what could be. He faces the world as a man solely depending on the woman's mercy; when he should face the world as a man who does not desire mercy in love. Rather than presenting himself for her evaluation and approval, he disvalues himself and dwells on his own cowardice. There are only two avenues to pursue for a man in love: confession or lonely silence. If he does not confess his love, he will be subjected to a constant state of terror, anxiety, and instability--a state of fear of the possible by virtue of his inability to treat his emotions with the seriousness that the value he seeks demands, the value of gaining the woman's affection. Thus, if he does not confess his love, pain, torture, anxiety, and a sense of inner emptiness is all that he can expect to feel. But if he does confess his love and face his emotions openly, he grants himself the potential to have the achievement of his value realized, or if not, the capacity to accept his reality and move on. There is no value to be gained in silent loneliness, and, instead, one can only be certain that the pain and fear one will fill in remaining silent will be far worse than the pain and fear of rejection which may open up the possility of forming a partnership with someone he desires, which can potentially put an end to his fear and pain of facing existence for the rest of his life.