Mart-deBlog

I have been thinking a lot lately about this simple question: can a feeling be true or false. If someone says that he or she feels something, can that be mistaken? For example, I say I am angry but you know that I am actually sad and not angry. However, if it feels to me as anger then how can it be anything but anger? Now the most pressing case is of course with judging love, it is here that the question becomes bombastic, but where it does really matter: Is there true love and false love, or just love? Who can judge and how do you judge?

There have been three situations in which a girl said she loved me and I knew she was wrong. I have reacted differently every time because I simply do not know how to deal with it. In the first situation, I was so sure of myself that I told her "no, you're not." I thought she played a trick on me because we had a history of mindfucking. The result was that she confirmed to herself that I was wrong ("Ey, only I know what I feel") and thus she felt more and more her false love for me, while I saw how it happened and could confirm to myself how false her love indeed was. A nasty circle was created, destroying a lot. With the second girl, I tried the 'show instead of tell' by saying that I was even more in love with her while I acted completely contrary, just as she did. But instead of the mirror-effect, I became the asshole evil liar while she could settle in her victim role. I could have seen it coming, I was stupid. With the third girl I just had sex, accepting false love, feeling bad about it while we both knew the lie.

I have the feeling I did something wrong in every case but I just do not know how to deal with this. So, maybe I might have been completely wrong all along, things are always exactly as they are said by the one feeling it. But my common sense speaks up, for example, too often we have trouble expressing our feelings, choosing the wrong words. No still I believe a feeling can be mistaken and not only the expression of it. But this opinion is not more than a leap of faith. If you do not believe in the truth and falsity it seems to me that the world becomes nihilistic and feelings never authentic. And it is useless to say "what anger might be to you, is what I would call sadness" because you can say that about every word you use, yet we understand each other.

Or to put the question in an extreme context, is it possible that you know the feelings of someone better than him- or herself. I clearly believed this, as arrogant as I can be sometimes. So all we could do, if I am right, is to strive for a certain clarity of feeling (or intensity for the blunt), because there is no other way of ascertaining the truth of your own emotion, they can trick you and lie. And you have to judge the emotions of another, trust them or reject them with confidence. If this sounds simple, do realize it implies a unromantic distance from your emotions. But how to do this right, I have no clue.

That is my way for now, until I know better.