One of the uncertainties of life is about whether someone loves you or not, whether someone cares for you or not. And really, there's this spectrum between yes and no, though most people tends to see yes and no as entirely different symbols. One of the reasons the neurotypical people also evaluated gestures and meta-lingual aspects, was because it helps in approximating the propensity of the answer. Pity for the non-neurotypical people, they just have to take the hard way to understand it.

But really, does it really matter that someone loves you or not? Does it really matter at all if someone cares for you or not? Despite of the inherent –almost genetic, social tendency within us, it doesn't really helps whether someone loves you or not.

So a friend said that saying I love you to someone special equals giving her an assurance that everything is going fine, and that she's being respected. If that so, especially given the fact that there's been lots of debates around the meaning and implications of love, then Nat King Cole was right: love is indeed a 'many splendored thing'.

Assurance leads to human security and people seldom looks for it in others, especially in those they see as being significant for them. I guess that's the reason you don't ask "do you love me?" to a random passerby. But the fact that one needs to resort one's seemingly important aspect of security to someone else is definitely irrational. You just don't put your golden eggs in a cranky basket that would fall apart when you're not looking!

When it comes to friendship –even to relationships, there's Jakobson's theory that the 'channel' will fall apart when you're not using it –thus you enact phatic communication to ensure the channel will be usable in times of need. This explains my view of how the egg basket would fall apart when you're not looking. Could you really believe that someone would still be there after times of absence? It's possible, albeit only on prior notice and with a measurable amount of mutual interest, perhaps, but still on a limited amount of time.

Now, let's have ourselves an imaginary basket that wouldn't ever break apart. Would you really dare to put your golden egg in it? Even if the basket wouldn't fall apart, it's still highly irrational to put something of value in something else than yourself. As you safe keep and protect what's precious to you, it's irrational to think that you'll put your eggs anywhere.

Further, the egg never really existed. There might be love, as there might be god, but there's no security whatsoever coming from anyone as you're the only one you could depend on. It's pre-programmed within your animal brain anyway. Your security doesn't come but from yourself. It's one's sole responsibility to ensure one's survival, or when it comes to happiness –or good mood whatsoever, it's one's responsibility to ensure one's good mood.

In other words, you don't date or get involved with someone because she could make you happy through whatever sweet things she said and done. You date someone and get involved with her because you're somewhat happy when you're being with her. Either way, eventually you'd end up with someone you would eventually end up with.

That way, you don't really need to push her around to say stupid essentially meaningless words to assure you that everything is okay and sorts. Getting to know someone is entirely a lifetime experience; need it be occupied with an exchange of meaningless remarks? No, it doesn't.

Perhaps it may seem like taking someone for granted. But in truth, taking someone for granted is an entirely different concept. Taking one for granted implies that you're pretty much assured that she'd do things in an established manner, a somewhat predictable and culturally expected reaction. Based on this scheme of /taking for granted/, relationships are well platonic, filled with so much phatic communications, small talks, expressions of closeness, intimate expressions, and other meaningless stuffs that was used to build the context in a vague resemblance of what it may seem to most people.

Instead of exchanging stupid remarks, I'll rationally prefer to utilize informational exchange. Getting to know someone is a continuous lifetime process, and it's necessary to know how your partner thinks, what her ideology is, how she constructed her life space, how things cultivate a certain meaning in her head –and in turn, ideated a certain effect. Thus, you enact an interpretive research on that someone you're involved with. You don't value her in a positivistic manner as you don't stand next to her with all your theoretical expectations; this is another human we're talking about, not some meaningless random fuck-ups that needs to be assessed and evaluated in order to understand it and eventually prevent it from happening again.

In not expecting one to do a certain thing in a certain manner, you give her enough freedom to do it in her own personal way, giving her enough freedom to express herself in a specific –often irrational, manner that suits her self [originally I intended to put the word /cognition/ there, but I remembered that oftentimes, people are not necessarily rational when it comes to emotions].

And yeah, there's this dichotomy between /having/ and /being/, and you can consult Fromm for that. One of the interesting things is that, by standing in love in a positivistic manner, as you exchange stupid senseless symbols of loving to your partner, you simply behave in a /having/ kind of manner. While Fromm suggested that the better form is the /being/ part.

In /having/, you define yourself as one's partner, one's boyfriend, and one's whatever. You define yourself as having a certain quality, another possibly imagined object in your lifeworld. And in relationships, your actions will be logically led by dominations, as one might treat an object. In the other terminus, you have a /being/ kind of relationships, where you define yourself as being something for your special someone. It doesn't really matter, whatever your qualities are.

In this kind of thing, you act and think by assessing what might produce a certain meaning to your special someone. Since you can't entirely predict what's what, the best you can do is simply to do your things, and pray that perhaps that thing you do would produce the desired effect. And this is where the aforementioned research comes in handy. It helps in building theories about your partner that would shrink and categorize the scope of her reaction. And really, it's so irrational and intentionally stupid to craft your message to blur the truth while in truth your intention was to assess how things would produce what effect.

Oh, and there's this onion thing about people. The multilayered property of the onion is an analogous equal to personalities. It's said that as people interacts, they peels off their layers as they went to a more intimate stage. In this perspective, it's normal for people to wear masks of persona; in fact, masks of persona are so natural, it's impossible for one not to have it, given the complexity of one's mind. The only difference is that some people peel faster as others peels slower. That applies to the neurotypical, but not to minority others. There are certain kind of people that are so reluctant to peel off his layers, it takes almost a year of fluctuating uncertainties and incessant hostilities just to have him open up a bit.

With the goal of obtaining significant core personality information in mind, it's basically stupid to speak about the peripheral –as in small talks. It's far more effective to jump right to the core ideas of self, and learn the attribution processes inside out. Naturally, we ascribed social attributes inside out by learning its values, properties, potential advantages and benefits, as well as its potential risks. So why need we assess people outside in? Most answers would revolve around "because that's how it's culturally expected and practiced," but since it's not necessarily true, why don't we do it the better way?

I could accept that most people are just not critical when it comes to the things they learn during primary socializations. Even the most critical person I know was just not so critical when it comes to analyzing such things. I guess people are not as smart as they seem to be.