Cooking Love

I am starting to feel like some love doctor. I don’t know what people see in me but for some strange reason I attract people with problems of the heart. And man, how I surprise myself with the gems of wisdom I never thought I had about love and relationships. Here is one elementary case I’d want to share with you.

Ed is a friend of mine from the gym. I just recently found him out, if you know what I mean. And apparently he is going out with a boy for almost close to a month now. The problem is that the boyfriend has not been texting him for days now. He tells me they had a slight falling out a few days ago because, well, somebody texted Ed asking for the perfunctory “stats and asl pls.” Ed did not really set out to seek my advice but the big brother instincts in me just couldn’t resist not letting out some salted words.

My first concern really was that if there was enough reason for Ed’s bf to be jealous. Ed says there’s none. He feels that his boy was unreasonable because how in the hell could he expect Ed to control who texts him. Hhhmmm. Really, he can’t, but I told him what he could control. He can control to whom he gives out his number.

Initially he gave me the impression that he misses his boy and that he wanted to see him again. But as I sifted through the emotions and thoughts that he reveal to me, I realize what his real problem is. He is young and he doesn’t know what he wants. His youth is not a problem as is. I know many who have found true love at a young age. What created the complication for him is the fact that he doesn’t know what to do with his life.

Here’s my advice. I told him that love is just an ingredient in the kitchen called life, and life is a series of cooking different dishes. The first step to cooking a dish is finding out what kind of dish he’d like to cook. From there, he can tell what ingredients he needs from the kitchen rack. Now, is a love life an ingredient he needs in the dish that he wants to cook at this point in his life?

I let Ed figure out the answer for himself. Kids. They make me feel ancient.