What It Means to Be in Love: Interviews

Of the two couples I chose to interview, one I knew through familial connections and one I knew through a mutual friendship with them. One couple is comprised of Meg, who is eighteen years old, and Harry, who is nineteen years old. I’ve known them both since the second grade and I was casual acquaintances with them until seventh grade when we became much closer and to this day, I count them among my closest friends. They were together for about six months back in seventh grade, but they split up until junior year of high school and are still together in the present. As they define it, their “real” relationship just celebrated its second anniversary. The other couple is comprised of Ginny, who is thirty-three years old, and Jason, who is thirty-five years old. They met in college at the University of Florida eleven years ago and they have been married for nine years now.

I chose these couples because I wanted to have an example of a relationship from both the family side of my life and from the friendship side of my life. Of my friends, Meg and Harry have been together the longest and while I am close with other friends of mine and casually acquainted with their respective significant others, the couple of Meg and Harry is the only one in which I consider myself close friends of both people involved. As for Ginny and Jason, I’ve always felt like they’re my favorite cousins. I know it might seem like a ghastly thing to say, but I think everyone knows who their favorite cousins are, regardless of whether or not they’re comfortable admitting it. For whatever reason, I just connected with them the most growing up and we have always shared a mutual interest in the life development and milestones for one another. 

To quickly summarize how each of the people I interviewed feels about love, it can be boiled down into a series of four sentences. Harry said “Love is the force that motivates you to try to bring nothing but the utmost happiness to the person you love.” Meg felt it was a more ambiguous feeling and said, “Love is investing more than just time into a relationship, it’s pouring your heart, emotions, and soul into a person and trusting them to take care of it.” Ginny mulled the inner feelings of love alongside the outward expressions of that love and said, “Love is giving of yourself to another person and not expecting anything in return.” Finally, Jason said, “Love is the need to be with someone, the feeling that you aren’t complete or completely happy unless you are with that person.”

As for what they think about the aspects of their relationships that work and do not work, there was a bit more of a variation in the answers. Harry believes that as long as you can make someone feel both happy and loved, then the relationship will be successful. Meg leaned more towards trust as being the sole component for ensuring the success of a relationship. Conversely, Meg and Harry were very in tune as to what doesn’t work about relationships, as they both cited their stubborn natures contributing to meaningless arguments and the long distance posed by being at two separate universities as the elements that cause a strain on their love.

When it comes to Ginny and Jason, both felt that supporting each other was the most important thing they could do to cultivate a successful marriage and overall relationship. Ginny was of the belief that by having a comprehensive understanding of her partner, she is better able to support him and that helps her to open up channels of communication, which in turn allows for the relationship to be healthier. Jason said that both big gestures and “the little things” are crucial in attempts to make his wife happy, but sometimes he feels as if he’s not doing enough to improve the quality of a relationship and when there is unhappiness, then he blames himself instead of communicating and talking through the feelings of unhappiness with Ginny. He is consistently resolved to “try harder next time.”

In reading the answers to my interview questions, I found myself learning quite a bit about the people who have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, people who I was fairly confident I knew pretty well already or at least better than most other friends of mine and most other members of my family. Since I was friends with Harry before I was friends with Meg and I now go to college with Harry and I see him every day instead of just every day at school and occasionally on weekends, I have become very accustomed to learning about their relationship through Harry’s lens. Whenever there is a problem with the two, I only know Harry’s side of the story, which is usually him griping about a conflict between him and Meg that he believes is innocuous and she believes is very important and because of their opposing thoughts, the conflict deepens. I was surprised to learn that Meg is aware that sometimes the arguments they have are rather unnecessary as she said, “I am sometimes high maintenance…I care about the little things more than I should…We argue and sometimes we are both too stubborn to admit that we were wrong.” This is not to say that when conflict arises in their relationship that Harry is entirely blameless, but it was just very enlightening for me to realize that while Harry’s complaints are occasionally valid and he communicates them to Meg and even though she says she’s stubborn, she realizes that sometimes she can be too hung up on one minor conflict, in particular. I was always under the impression that Harry would deal with this by complaining to his friends and then internalizing his resentment without voicing it, but clearly the topics he poses to us are also dealt with between the two of them. They’re consciously working on things to improve their relationship and I believe this is simply a matter of maturity.

After Harry and Meg broke up in seventh grade, I made a ten dollar bet with Meg that they would start dating again at some point in the future. She was pretty resolute against this and believed that they would never date again, but eventually when they did, she gave me the ten dollars and told me in this interview that it was “the best thing she ever lost.” When they reconciled and began dating again, I was under the impression that an attraction (after four years of separation) had grown between the two of them and they decided to start dating because middle school was a nonsense time when relationships were “for insane people,” according to Meg. In fact, the aforementioned maturity was crucial because Harry and Meg were familiar with each other and they were aware of what caused their prior break-up and they made an effort to communicate apologies and vows to do better before they started dating. I was surprised to learn that a great deal of thought went into their decision to rekindle their relationship as I believed it was merely a coupling that formed out of a mutual desire to be with someone for the rest of one’s adolescence.

As for what did not surprise me about Harry and Meg’s relationship, I was not surprised to learn that Meg can be very anal about aspects of their relationship that Harry considers “trivial.” I was also not surprised when Meg said that Harry can be very emotional and vulnerable underneath his “tough shell.” I know Harry very well and I know there’s a real and full heart underneath his private exterior that he presents to the world. Both of these unsurprising facts coincide in that I know Meg loves proclamations of love and the sharing of photographs through methods like Instagram and Twitter, but Harry is very self-conscious of the things he shares on social media platforms because of the way he acts around people to whom he is not exceptionally close.

In terms of Ginny and Jason’s relationship, I was not at all surprised to learn about the strain that having two children placed on their relationship, which was very introspective and focused on just two people before children turned a relationship of love into a relationship of finances, dependency, and responsibility for other, tiny human beings. I do not believe there is any fault for people whose relationships are tested by the presence of children, even if the consequences of procreation are discussed beforehand. Someone can want children and still be entirely unprepared to handle what comes with having a son and a daughter. To me, this is simply common sense so when it came up in the interview with Ginny and Jason, I was not surprised to learn that there were feelings of “cold feet” and a reactionary feeling of resentment towards that skepticism from Jason and Ginny, respectively.

However, I was quite surprised to learn that Ginny and Jason felt that, before they met each other, they were undeserving of love. Objectively, Ginny is very intelligent, pretty, and clever and Jason is funny, attractive, and ambitious, and they’re both incredibly fun people to be around. But because of their “prior relationships,” they both felt that they were not worthy of love or a long-lasting relationship that would give them a great deal of happiness. But when they met each other, they connected instantly and both made one another feel loved, wanted, and valuable. Around each other, they didn’t feel the need to look or be like “lead actor” or “Hollywood celebrity” types of people.

This feeling of wanting to make the other person in a relationship feel wanted is, of course, something that both couples have in common, but another important similarity in the relationships is the ability to be as comfortable as best friends when around each other. Each of the four people I interviewed mentioned that and cited effective communication as what provides them with that feeling. I inferred from their answers, though, that there was more than just communication at play. I believe it relates to something mentioned in the Moodle reading, “Bridging the Sciences of Mindfulness and Romantic Relationships” by Karremans, Schellekens, and Kappen. It read, “A number of mindfulness interventions have been developed in the past decades…perhaps the most important reason for the enormous rise in mindfulness research is the increasing popularity of interventions and training programs.” While communication is absolutely important, I believe it stems from the couples being mindful of each other. Ginny said that little things like being asked what she wants when Jason goes to the store helps her feel more valued in the relationship and it improves their connection, however slightly. But through this form of communication that is shared among all four interviewees, elements of mindfulness develop because all four are conscious of how important that is and while they may not go to interventions or programs to help cultivate these skills, they are actively working to improve on them.

One of the biggest differences in the relationship I noticed was the ideas had by each couple about what love would be like when they were younger. Harry and Meg were under the impression that it was going to be immensely challenging and demanding a lot of hard work, but they both came to learn that it was “rather easy to give yourself over to someone and just love them.” On the other hand, Ginny and Jason were much more influenced by the contrast in love and relationships they saw from their parents and from media like movies and television. Ginny thought her parents were boring and did not want a relationship like theirs and she instead desired one like her favorite romances with a lot of drama and passion. When she grew comfortable and happy with Jason, though, she was much more enticed by being able to love someone with ease and lead a pleasant, if not always exciting life.

When it comes to the way my own thinking changed by interviewing these two couples and understanding the ins and outs of their relationships, I believe I certainly underwent a bit of a transformation, thanks in large part to the importance each of these couples has in my life. I believe I always knew that there is a lot of work to be done when it comes to relationship, but I never really put two and two together that the work to fix the relationship has to be mutual, open, and communicative. I was always under the impression that if something goes wrong, I would just try to fix it by myself, when it is impossible because a relationship is built upon the efforts of two people. Additionally, I have gone back and forth on whether or not love can be boiled down to a science throughout this course and I recently was leaning towards the idea that paradigms and scientific evidence are more able to define love than anything else, but the experiences of actual couples changed this belief because they all think that love is indescribable and “you know it when you feel it.” To me, this shows more about love than a scientific experiment ever could.

Questions I Posed to Harry, Meg, Ginny, and Jason:

• How would you define love?
• When it comes to your relationship, what do you do that you feel makes your relationship work well? In what ways does your relationship not work well?
• What steps do you take to improve aspects of your relationship about which you are not entirely enthused?
• Is there a preconceived notion of love that you had when you were younger which you have since realized was highly romanticized or fantastical?
• Is there anything about love that has exceeded what you expected from future relationships when you were a child or an adolescent?
• What made you realize that the other person in your relationship was the one you wanted to give yourself over to and share part of your love with?