Valentine’s Day is at our doorstep, meaning it’s that time of the year for the singles to complain about being single while those who are not take a rush to the store to get last minute chocolates and flowers. I, on the other hand, won’t be doing any of those things. Instead I will avert your attention to a comic. Yes, a comic. It is a popular webcomic and there’s this particular topic in the comic related to this loving holiday. Romance. Not love specifically, but romance.
In this comic romance is not a thing that revolves around love, but revolves around a relationship we have with a person and it is divided into four categories.
The first two categories of romance revolve around a FORM of love, and that is partnership love and protective love we feel towards a friend. The partnership love is very much like a regular couple romance, and they call it matespritship. (The terms for these romances do not matter and are just random creations of the author.). The protective love towards a friend, a moiraligence, is meant to describe our feeling of protectiveness towards a friend or loved one. The feeling and need to keep someone safe and happy, no matter who they are or what they do.
The next two categories don’t actually focus on any kind of love, or even anything positive. The third category of this romance is called kismesistude. It describes a hateful relationship towards a person. And even though that’s not actually romance for us, in this comic it very much is. The need to hate someone, to rival them in every waking moment of their lives and just to be a nuisance to them is something we all have felt. The feeling is often a kind of good frustration. Good but negative.
And the last category is auspestice. It’s actually a relationship between three people. Two of the people hate each other and are very close to being kismesis, but for their own good the third person is there to keep them calm and down to earth, to maintain peace between them.
For us, these nonsense words from a crazed online author are meaningless and silly or even absurd, but when you think about it you actually have at least once in life experienced this kind of relationship with people, but couldn’t call it love, or friendship. This wasn’t something about true love or anything, but it is something to just think about for a bit. Have you had any of these kinds of relationship with other people?
Petra Dolovski