You know when you're little, you imagine all these things for the future.

You think about who you want to be, how you want to grow up, all the kinds of things you want to experience when you're older, you just have so much passion for life. The last thing you think about is love. You don't think about falling in love, relationships and marriage. When little girls start thinking about love they have this picturesque ideal of a guy in their mind. Thinking that they'll end up meeting prince charming, falling madly in love, and have this huge, froufrou wedding. Some of them even go as far as to plan out the exact wedding details, write out a guest list, and talk about their perfect dress.

I was never like that.

When I was a little girl I thought weddings were stupid. My first big crush was Richard Gere, I guess you could say I was into older men. So I spent a lot more time wondering what NAFTA stood for, what Java meant, what Malawi was and why everyone was making such a big deal about it's elections, since I was under the impression that everyone had them. By the time I started to even think about boys as something other than the best pick for the soccer team, all my girl friends already knew what kind of guy they wanted, who they thought was cute, and various number scales to measure how worthy a guy was or wasn't of any of us. I found most of it to be kind of ridiculous and felt like none of it really fit in with the way I thought of boys.

A big part of it for me was feeling like maybe I wasn't ready for it. When I thought about boys I started seeing them as an extension of my girl friends. I thought that maybe I could talk to them the way I did my girl friends and play together like I did with them. I found out really quickly that I couldn't. A girl and boy playing together meant that they were either really close friends that were eventually bound to become boyfriend and girlfriend or that they were already at that latter stage, and while I didn't particularly care what the rest of my friends thought, the boys did. A lot of questions arose in my mind, I wondered what being someone's girlfriend really meant (especially since I had always thought 'novia' was the name given to the girl getting married), what a relationship was, and how I could know what I wanted out of another person when I hadn't even figured myself out yet.

I found a lot of different things during this time, mostly about myself, and molded a lot of my first views on relationships.

The word 'Novia' is the female counterpart of a romantic relationship and used to imply that the couple had marriage as their eventual objective, which explains why it's still used to mean 'Bride.' My mom told me that being someone's girlfriend was a big responsibility and that it meant making a really important promise to another person to only share certain things with them. Some books told me that being someone's girlfriend meant that I was going to marry that person, others said that it meant I was living with that person without being married, and most of them said that it meant I was being 'physical' with that person. Looking up relationships was harder because I found out that there was all kinds of relationships between lots of different things. It led me to the conclusion that as many different relationships exist in math, there's twice as many between people, and I have to be the one that chooses what I want it to be like.

I realized very quickly that while I was comfortable with looking at all these things analytically I was no where near wanting to actually have these things in my life. I found out that even if I could write a list of qualities I like in other people I couldn't guarantee that those qualities would mean that I would like that person 100% of the time and that I liked being surprised by people so a list of this sort seemed kind of pointless. I also found out that it was important to me to know more about myself before I was willing to focus on someone else, I felt kind of selfish about it, but stuck with this belief because it felt right. This is also when I made up my mind about what a romantic relationship was to me and made the decision that I didn't want one until I was ready for marriage.

Then one day I grew up and now my beliefs on love and relationships are more developed.

I wouldn't necessarily say different, but absolutely more defined. It's not so much about a specific list of must haves and cant stands, but a group of values that are important to me. I no longer think that refining myself as an individual is selfish, I think it's smart and it makes sense in my mind. I guess now a days the most important thing to me is that I actually have my own view and that I stick to it. I don't by any means expect other people to agree with it or hold their beliefs on love up to mine. I just wish more people would actually take the time to figure our what they are.

Do you know yours? <3

Peace, Love & Pancakes
-Liberty