Alfred Benedict T.

San Andres
2010-24246 Psych 150, Prof. Decenteceo
Love is such a fragile little thing, isnt it? For one moment, everything seems to go so
well. You feel like youre on top of the world and that nothing, not even the claws of Beelzebub
himself can rip you away from your pedestal. Youre in an emotional high and you dont notice
that all it takes is a slight gust of wind for everything to fall apart. In that moment, you realize
that love, romantic love in particular, is not like a mountain stable and firm, but rather its more
like a small thin piece of glass, the kind that shatters into a million pieces when you so much as
brush your shoulder against it. Thats not even the funny part; the hilarity of it all begins when a
person flings themselves, perhaps due to some strange masochistic tendency, back into the lions
den in the hopes of attaining the unattainable. Its stupid and its illogical but thats what makes
it strangely amusing.
This is partly why I want to become a lawyer. I wont deal with criminal cases or those
that involve that collective group of monkeys in suits we call the government, rather, Id like to
specialize in annulments, separation and divorce which hopefully becomes legal by the time I
pass the bar. It seems like a fair trade; I help my clients get what they want and I get a ton of
laughs from watching love die over and over again. In fact, even if I lose the case I wouldnt care
much; the mere fact that either the husband or the wife will come in the first place probably
means that their love for each other is already dying of an overdose in some cheap motel room.
You can just imagine my glee when I heard that we were going to annul one of our
classmates! The task seemed simple enough: diagnose the husband or wife with some kind of
psychological disorder which renders them incapable of performing marital duties. The illness
also needs to be grave, incurable, and present in the marriage before the two misguided lovebirds
even got hitched.
With the conditions made clear, the class was split up into five or so groups with each
one having a person with a sob story to tell. The petitioner, in the case of the group I was in,
told us the story of her failed marriage with her husband which ended only about a month
before and from what she said, it was obvious that there was something wrong with the guy. Just
to name a few seemingly insane things he did, let me start with the time she accidentally
squeezed his hand too hard that he got so pissed and threatened a tuk-tuk driver with a bolo knife.
There was also that time when he was talking about his many sexual exploits to a group of
friends in a party with the petitioner right beside him. There was also that other time when they
first met when he called the petitioner stupid because she merely asked him for directions. The
petitioner also mentioned that when she told him he was gaining a little weight he stopped
eating for a while. He also has a habit of telling the petitioner that she needs to exercise more.
He did a lot more seemingly insane things and a couple of normal ones as well but to list them all
down here would be tedious; I think we can see that hes totally bonkers. We ended up saying
that he has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
The funny thing is that almost all the other groups reported something similar to what we
had. I dont mean to say that all them had angry Middle-Eastern men who carried around a foot
long blade with them, rather, they, to some extent, portrayed the respondent as a bit loco-in-
the-coco. I honestly find that hard to believe. I mean, it seems that it would be significantly
easier to find a normal break-up, for instance, something along the lines of, he was cheating on
me or he doesnt speak to me like we used to. Perhaps that was the point of the entire
exercise in the first place: to see which traits a person displays through certain actions can be
attributed to a certain kind of psychological disorder.
Initially, I got the impression that all of the respondents in all the cases were bad
people. Looking back though, are they really as horrible as we make them out to be? Dont get
me wrong; I still think that the knife-wielding weight-conscious boyfriend-from-hell is totally a
loony. Im talking about everyone else. Is it really right for me, and perhaps every other person
in the world, to judge one another so quickly without even getting to know each other first? Isnt
a person more than just the exaggerated stories and bigger than the larger-than-life tales we hear
from another party?
In the first place, can we really know one another well enough to make a more-or-less
objective assessment of another person? People only show others what they want them to see.
They hide behind so many faades depending on which one suits the current situation he/she is in
best. Sometimes we never get to even glimpse what a person is really like and all we have to deal
with are masks, or as some other people like to call them, personas. Knowing this, am I really in
the position to pass judgment on another and instantly attach labels to them? I mean, in reality, I
could actually believe that love isnt a joke and that it is the most beautiful thing in the world
capable of bringing out the best within people. I could not even want to be a lawyer and that Im
only saying that because I see that my life cannot go in any other direction and whether I like it
or not, thats where I will end up. The beauty of it all is that youll never know.
(This is probably the reason why I can never call a person bad; the closest I say is that the
action he/she did was bad.)

This is why I think trust is at the core of all human relationships. The fact is, no matter
how much we try to box people within certain categories, whether crazy, sane, good, bad,
responsible, irresponsible and the like, we can never know who they truly are. Trust is the oil that
keeps the entire machinery of human existence going. Trust is the thing that makes you believe
that youre groupmates in a certain project will do their job properly. On the other hand, trust is
also the thing that makes you not think twice that the taxi driver wont lock you in the car and
drive you off to God knows where. This makes every day in this less-than-perfect human life
such a thrill! Each second, minute and hour is like placing a bet on a hand of poker where the
stakes vary each and every time; the only difference is not knowing what cards youre dealt with
until the end of each hand.
It is this element of danger and uncertainty that makes life so interesting. What you think
you know so well may turn out to be false the next time you check and it is this element of doubt
that keeps me going each and every single day.