That Special Someone ?

“You make me feel so special, like I am the most special one in your life. You are mine,” she said with feeling. She was happy and it showed.

“What did I do?” he asked.

“Well, you take good care of me, you pamper me, you care about my well-being and ask me how I feel. You do little things for me. You find such positive things in me. You notice them and let me know you appreciate them. You are considerate and thoughtful towards me. It makes me feel I am special, the special person in your life. My ex- never made me feel this way. Your acts make me feel as if you belong to me and I belong to you. You are so nice to me.” She gushed, looking into his eyes.

They were both middle-aged, out of their first marriages, and enjoying the process of getting to know a person who seemed to be doing all the right things. They had not even had their first major disagreement or quarrel.

His heart went out to her. He thought about it for a little bit, his brows furrowed just a little bit even as the eyes softened.

Then gently he drew her up close to him, held her, looked into her eyes and said, “I hope those are not the reasons you think I love you. I want you to know that everything I do for you is tinged with love, but I want you to understand my true feelings for you from something else besides these things that I do for you or how I am towards you. Unfortunately, these are not the acts meant to make you feel special to me. I try to be nice to everyone, unless they earn it and make me change towards them. Try and understand how I feel for you from something besides these.” He kissed her.

She seemed a bit disappointed and a bit surprised. She even started to feel a bit hurt and tried to hide her feelings.

“Oh! It’s all right. Are you not sure about your feelings towards me? Do you not love me? Tell me, I can take it.” she said, bravely with a smile.

“No, no! That is not the case. I could easily tell you I love you. But that would be too easy. I love a lot of things about you, almost everything I have seen about you and heard from you, I love a lot of your thinking and I like you more every day. I hope one day we will each feel we are the special someone in each other’s life. However, I am concerned that you feel special because of the way I have been towards you.”

“Why? Why are you concerned? What is wrong? What is wrong if I feel special because of the way you treat me?” she asked with more curiosity than stress.

“Because, I like to be nice to most people, treat them well, with love, respect and let them know they are valuable to me and special to the world. I wish we could all treat everyone else that way, even though it is not practical, I, myself, cannot do so all the time and some do not deserve to be treated that way,” he replied with a smile.

She listened silently and thought about it for a while.

 “And it gets even worse,” he continued.

“In what way?” she asked, now a bit intrigued.

“If you believe being nice to you, the way I have been, means you are the special one to me, you might infer the same about the way I treat most of my friends and even some strangers. You might then not feel you are the ‘special one’. There are times when I, like most of us, take a close loved one more for granted and am  ‘nicer’ to a stranger or a person I care less about. Would you then feel jealous or mistake my feelings towards you and towards another person? I have been through one failed marriage because of that kind of thinking. I felt compelled to treat others not nicely, or treat them unfairly to make my ex- feel special. I don’t want to repeat that with you. You mean too much to me, even now. I want you to understand me. Right now I see so many of your qualities that I love and appreciate. There may be some I come across that I may not like, but I want you to feel my love and that you are my special someone from something beyond these. That feeling will not be because I love all your qualities, but because I love YOU.”

“Do you love me?” she asked

“Yes.”

“Am I special to you?

“Yes.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“This is just the beginning… We need to grow into something more than loving each other and being special. It will not just be because of how nice you are to me, or how nice I am to you. It will be because will have grown into each other’s special someone. You are the only candidate, I am not looking elsewhere. One day, we will both realise it has already happened without us noticing it. I look forward to that. Deal?” he said.

“Deal!” she replied.

They sealed the deal with a kiss.


Copyright  (c) Kannan Narayanamurthy 2012

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