I got an email from a very close friend of mine asking me a question that she had recently read in a magazine. The question stated “If you could choose between Love and Independence, which would you choose?” After thinking about this for about twenty-three hours, I believe that is the least amount of time you should give to any serious thought for a discussion in life, if you are afforded the time, I had an interesting take on things. How is love defined? And why should we “have” to choose? Let’s take a trip down the list. Love can be defined as many things. To make love: sexual activities (often including sexual intercourse) between two people. To give and or receive love: any object of warm affection or devotion. To feel loved: a deep feeling of sexual desire and attraction. To be in love: a strong positive emotion of regard and affection. A score of zero in tennis, a nickname for a beloved person, etc. Okay, so you get the point, I could go on for days.

However you would define it, when it comes to relationships, we always find our self at odds with something. Most of the time, that something, is ourselves or the thought of us as an individual. Independence is one of those things. I often struggle with this ideology of being “ProMe”, most of the time my independence gets the best of me and fuels my pride. Pride is a whole separate can of worms, we’ll talk about that at another date. Love and independence seem to have a direct correlation. The easiest feature about a person that we can fall in love with is someone being genuine, or being themselves. We fall in love with them having an independent sense of identity. No one likes a faker.

It seems that most times during love we hear talk of two becoming one. This may be a good thing if the relationship tends to be a symbiotic or a dual-symbiotic one, where one lover feeds off of the other or both feed off of the others energy equally. However, most often this may be problematic where we start to lose ourselves or lose pieces of us. That situation where we begin to lose ourselves in love. Lauryn Hill made a song a while back that speaks directly to losing herself in love and it chimed, “I had to lose myself, so I could love you better”. I disagree. Being a fan of strength and independence, we shouldn’t have to lose ourselves at all. Even if true love is selfless and the goal of love is to give your self to another, we should always keep sight of who we are at our core. In fact we should fight to keep the best parts of us, the parts that our significant others have fallen in love with in the first place.

Back to the question at hand. If you had to make a choice, would you choose love or independence? If I had to choose one or the other, I would choose love, but not without stipulation. I’d choose love because I believe without it, we are missing out on major developmental connections as human beings. Yet, within that construct, we should always try to maintain a certain sense of self, a certain sense of me. Independence always seems to be something that we as lovers are either running from or bolting towards. Most lovers cannot find the balance between being who they are and being with the one they love. Oft times, this proves to be most difficult.

One of my favorite psychological theories is Erik Erikson’s ideas regarding the stage in life dealing with Identity Crisis. At Erikson’s stage of identity crisis, he spouts that before we can move onto the next crisis in life one should have all parts of themselves working in perfect harmony, in a “state of identity”. I think we can take a small portion of this and apply it to our thoughts of Love vs. Independence. The goal of two lovers should be to exist independently in a true state of identity. Free to reign as their true self, yet fit together seamlessly.

In closing, we should have the audacity to not feel obligated to make this choice. I challenge you all to ask yourselves, why can’t you do both? We as Lovers should be able to be independent and love in unison. There is a certain freedom in true love, and love and independence should really go hand in hand. Love is not demanding. True love should not warrant another person’s attention. We should be captivated by the energy of that person, and be free to be who we want to. Love is all accepting. If we don’t feel that way in a relationship, we should try to work through it, or get out of it and run for the hills. That’s my perspective, and I’m sticking to it. Until next time.

D. Layne