What does it mean to know someone? What does it mean to love someone?
They say you can never really know someone without personal interaction, the brutal honesty of eye contact and shared space. They say you cannot know someone without seeing them at their worst, at their lowest, in desperate situations or in unexpected ones. They say you cannot love them if you do not know them.
Why is this so?
What does it mean to know someone? It's nothing more than how much trust you extend to them, how much honesty you receive in return. How do you draw the contours of knowledge and the boundaries of truth? What is knowledge but the dissemination of truth? And what is truth if not the honesty in someone's eyes or in their smile, honesty in words and in laughter and in tears and in gratitude. There is truth in the way they live every day, in the thoughts they think and the words they speak; there is truth in how someone chooses to live their life.
We rarely get the whole picture or the full story, light illuminating every mysterious and unknown corner of a person. Everyone hides in different ways, from different people, carefully selective in who we allow to "know" us. We don masks in our daily lives, switching from one to another in consideration of our audience. No one knows the whole world; we only accept what we see or what we hear or what we experience with a kernel of faith.
Is it fair to ask for someone to be laid bare before us, stripped to the bones of their essence? In life we take what people are willing to give, the light that they choose to shine, and accept with faith their honest choices. This is what is given to us.
What does it mean to love someone if not to trust them?
The concepts of knowledge and truth and love are ill-defined, because words fall short in describing the feeling that suffuses us. No one knows us better than we know ourselves: we know what we feel. We know what it feels like to love.
And if you are in love with a lie - at least you are in love.
(It's never the love you regret, but the lie.)
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