How many people are you in love with?

Well, there is no way to dance around this one without saying how I define love and how I know it for myself.

When I was young I believed what I heard in songs: "When you breathe I want to be the air for you" or "I would die for you". I thought being in love meant that the other person was everything to you - the center of the universe that is "you"... and by definition, the center meant one. One person who is all things; the "other half"; the thing to make life complete.

Damn that's a lot of pressure!

How am I supposed to find this mythical being among the billions of people on the planet?

How could any man or woman live up to this?

This is how people think that they are in love with celebrities. They look perfect, dress perfect, and are constantly portrayed as perfect.

The point at which I realized that this was not love, but some societally induced, Hollywood sponsored fantasy, is the point that I considered myself an adult. Clearly, most of my friends plan to die never making it to full adulthood, but that's a different topic.

In high school I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston and it changed my life...not right then, but years and years later. I read the book in 1989 and have never reread it, yet the words reverberate in my mind constantly. In that book, she says:

"Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore."

Kind of sounds cliché: "love is like the sea...blah...blah...blah"... but that is not what she is saying. She is talking about love in a radically different way than most people see it. People tend to believe love is a human experience that we hold in common. I think that is only partially true. The fact that most humans seem to need to create emotional bonds between themselves and other people and objects is the common experience. The causes and nature of these bonds are as unique and innumerable as snowflakes.

I may love someone by my standard of love, and that person may love me by his/her standard, so here we are...two people becoming one, right? We become a single entity - "the relationship". NO! There is no way for that to happen. My experience will always be different from how the object of my affection experiences being loved by me. I believe the fundamental cause of failure of most relationships comes from the irrational desire to force ourselves and/or our loved ones to be confined to this "one relationship" concept (and things like money, fidelity, and child rearing are tangible ways of keeping score of this conformity).

Just think about the people in your life that you love and how different those relationships are:

Mother: care giver -to- Child: seeker of praise
Older sister: protector -to- Younger sister: rebel
Friend 1: life of the party -to- Friend 2: enabler

In each of these, two people are in a relationship together, but having a totally different experience. I didn't talk about sexual relationships because that muddies the waters here. At some other point I'll talk about the sex/love issue.

So, how many people am I "in love" with right now, this minute?

You will have to trust me that I do not believe in love of obligation. No one gets my love as a birthright.

So, including all relatives, 7.

I'm not going to say who they all are, but I will say that one of them is someone that I have known every minute of my life, but just met a little over a year ago. She knows me like no one else can. We are related to each other by marriage and by birth. She pisses me off sometimes because she takes the stupid things I say or do too seriously and laughs at things I think are really a big deal. We have meaningless sex all the time and she isn't judgmental or clingy.

She said the most incredible thing to me the other day.

She said, "I am so proud to be you".