This Just Made My Stomach Turn

The other day I ran into this girl I know on the subway. We had gone to school together, and hadn't talked much since, but I was still decent enough to have a conversation. She was pregnant, and so I made what non-repulsive baby small-talk that I could.

We ended up going to the same place for lunch, where we entered a somewhat ugly topic. She had gone off her birth control so that she would get pregnant in order to keep her boyfriend. I really didn't know what to say to that, so I resorted to the usual asking questions about her relationship, and found that she'd been in what sounded to me like a secure, trusting relationship. What the hell could make someone do this in a happy relationship!? Her answer: I thought he was going to leave me.

Wow. You got yourself pregnant because you THOUGHT he was going to leave you. I'm in no place to pass judgement on having thoughts about people leaving, but what right do you have to suck someone into a life of parenthood when they're barely an adult? She then went on to explain that she really, really loved him and so on and so forth, and I could just sit there and stare. If you love someone, wouldn't you want them to be happy? If you REALLY loved someone would you force them into a life like that for your own selfishness? I'll let you guys answer that one.

This then made me think about the state of peoples minds today. "I Love him/her because I get this fluttery feeling when I'm around them" or "They love me because they said so". I know that love is abstract...but even abstraction can hold some clarity. When you find people who really love each other, you find a recurring pattern: They do whatever is necessary to make the OTHER person happy, even if it's at their own expense (whether emotionally, physically, financially) they'll do what they have to to keep the other happy. How was she proving that she loved him by sucking him into early fatherhood? She wasn't. She was following the needy love that gets taught by the world today.

It really made me sick. Not really her situation, but the fact that she thought she loved him when in reality she was using him like a blanket. I know him as well, and he's a really great guy, and I can say right now that he's going to do whatever he can to build a family out of this, but overall it's going to hit both of them one day.

I guess the moral of this little rant is: Make sure you actually love them.