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The intimacy of being understood

They say that you don’t know the value of what you have until you lose it. You don’t agree, you know the value of what you have when you’re sitting in a café with your best friend and a good friend and you laugh at a joke and she looks over at the friend and says, “I know it looks like she’s being fake but trust me, that was genuine.”

She’s known you for three years and she already knows when you’re happy, when you’re trying to be happy, when you’re sad, when you’re annoyed, when you’re restraining yourself from having an all-out argument with someone, when you’re complaining about not having something you don’t even want, when you’re talking about something simply because you want to talk and when you’re nonchalantly talking about something that you would trade a kidney for. It’s what being understood feels like and it’s enough to make a grown woman with a heart cry.

Everyone wants to be loved, it’s natural, but being loved can hurt. It can cause immeasurable pain and conflict between the part of you that’s hurt and the part of you that knows this is the only way they know how to love. Being understood is different, it can make you feel a kind of comfort that’s hard to describe. The friend who covers for you when she sees that the conversation is hitting uncomfortably close to home, the sibling who distracts your parents from having realisations that are going to get you into trouble, the cousin who knows exactly what to say to get your mind off that person because she practically has a master’s degree in the study of you and the friend who nods along as you rant and rage over a situation she knows you don’t want to fix.

It's about not having to articulate the feeling, being able to convey it with just a look, a sigh, a laugh, a tear and the other person just getting it. When you understand someone, you know why they like that song, why they relate to that character, why that movie made them cry, why it made them laugh, whether those were happy tears or unhappy tears, you know it all because you know them. It’s not easy, knowing someone, but it is something that happens when you care enough about someone to learn what makes them tick, or cry for that matter. Loving someone is easy but taking the time to understand them is a lot harder. Which is why the next time you’re in the passenger seat of a grey car, stumbling over words and adjectives, you turn to her and simply end with, it’s just ugh, you know? And she takes her eyes off the road for a brief second as she smiles at you, “I know”.      

 

 

 

For Alessia, who is quite literally the Bethany to my Sydney and the only reason I make less than ten bad decisions a year.

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