The Small Things: Love in the context of friendship

My cousin T is confused. She is in love, though she would never use the term. She is in love and hurting because the man doesn’t seem to have the guts or initiative to tell her what the score is. They go out a lot and he keeps telling her how thankful he is that she’s always there for him. But that’s it. She tells me that maybe he’s just intimidated by the difference in their statures. After all she’s a doctor, he’s only a medtech. Maybe he’s thinking of their 15 year age gap. Or the fact that she’s not exactly free, just separated from her husband. How he just doesn’t want to ruin the friendship. Maybe.


It’s always the small stuffs that she remembers. How he frequently tells her not to look for a boyfriend. The dark look on his face when she tells him, just to gauge his reaction and find some hope, that the ex-love of her life, her best friend is back in the Philippines and is raring to meet up with her. Of course she conveniently leaves out the fact that the best friend is gay. She takes the look as jealousy, and smiles contentedly.

It’s hard to tread between recognizing how much she wants him and the glaring truth that in the face of the little things she’s taken to as signs –how he always turns to her when he has a problem, or how they go out almost every weekends, how it seems to me that he’s just not into her, at least not as girlfriend material.

It’s frustrating to gently force her to see the facts—how it’s always her who pays for the “dates” they have (But he can’t afford to eat at these places! Not with his salary!) . Or by the fact that he already has a girlfriend (But he just met her through text, and now he’s staying at the girl’s place. Siguro he just wants someone to sleep with since alam nya na di ako papayag.) Because love is not only blind, it is stubborn and resilient with hope. How love creates it’s own rationality, its own interpretation of reality. How even the improbable becomes possible just from the little things that the object of your affection does for you.

It’s a fix we get into at least once in our lives. To harbor irrational hopes for someone to return our love despite glaring markers to the contrary. So we tread this line closely when it is our turn to be the confidant. To balance our need to tell her the facts with a compassion, an understanding borne out of our own recollection of the pain , the memory of our own unrequited love. To be a patient and sympathetic listener and yet be firm enough to give an honest assessment of the situation. Again and again.

That most of the time, even with your honest evaluation of her predicament she’d turn deaf to it and hold on with her belief. It is not that she’s turned totally bonkers. A part of her, that brilliant logical part, knows that what she hopes for is a little difficult , especially with the way things are going. When despite aches of uncertainty, the mere fact that he’s still there as a friend is motivation enough, hope enough. And she tells you an honest answer, she just wants to savor the feeling. Which is just natural since love, even the unrequited kind, is a drug. It makes one high and gives us that giddiness, that chance to daydream and sift through the possibilities of tomorrow.

And how in the face of this, what she really needs is not a heart doctor or an adviser. But someone to talk to. Someone who’d just listen to her confusion and her feelings. To accept her fears, how she could not find the guts to ask her secret love the straight questions. So you sit there and listen. Be the friend that she needs. To learn something from the situation. And if you’re lucky and not too lazy, make a little blog entry out of it.