Last night I had a thought. In Spanish, there is a famous metaphor about love and oranges. It is said that when you find your person, your partner for life, you find your “media naranja” or half an orange. Your other half if you will. Now, it wasn’t until recently I started having problems with this concept. It wasn’t until I met my current partner, who loves me flaws and all, that I started questioning my lack of appreciation for those flaws. 

Consider an orange. As with any spherical object, it would roll if one were to push it. Now consider half an orange. First of all, it’s not a full orange. It has a missing part. Second of all, it is unable to roll on its own. If the purpose of an orange were to roll, half an orange would fail miserably at it. Then again, the purpose of oranges is not to roll, but bear with me. 

When one describes their partner as their “half an orange” (I am aware it sounds weird in English but for the purpose of the metaphor I will keep it this way), they imply that they would fail at their telos. However, single people are not failures. Mainly because we come to this world alone and we leave it alone, meaning that our natural state is alone, not severed from another person, no matter how much the poets like that overused “severed souls” plot device. 

Being half an orange is also problematic because it implies a dependency on the other person, sort of like if their being started and ended with them as if they were a part of the same being, like two halves of an orange are in reality just an orange split in half. If I have learned something in my naive nearly nineteen years of life is that nothing can be taken for granted, especially people. It is not a given that a relationship will last and one can enjoy the relationship more if they know that the other person doesn’t need them, doesn’t stay with them out of obligation, but rather truly wants them.

So reached this point in the soliloquy I was performing for the audience consisting of the four walls of my dorm room I asked myself; If we are not two halves of the same orange, then what are we? Now, I don’t like leaving metaphors halfway, so let’s stick with the orange concept. Let’s keep assuming that the telos of the orange is to roll. Now consider two oranges that roll in the same direction. These oranges will touch each other, lean on each other, maybe drift apart at some points. But they still roll in the same direction. Their telos is fulfilled, they fulfill it together, but without depending on each other to fulfill it.

By this point, my aloe had grown tired of hearing about oranges and life purposes, so I decided to go down the rabbit hole of the “why”. Why does the human being find the necessity to feel that kind of love?  Why is it that importantto us? To feel like every pore of their orange skin is accepted? The way I see it, it is all due to a lack of this love during the upbringing. In school, it is taught that a “higher power” has to approve one’s work. That is the teacher-student dynamic, that is how grades are passed. This teaches young kids that they must seek approval. This is useful to a certain extent when the child lacks the ability to supervise its own actions, however if overdone can lead to a sort of dependence of that approval for self acceptance. It is harder to accept behaviours of oneself that have been reprimanded before. Not only that, but if instead of treating those behaviours as one-time occurrences, they are treated as an inherent part of one’s personality, they might become associated with it and thus it will be harder to modify them in the future.

And it is important to love unconditionally. It is not fair for the subject of love to be in constant tension about whether or not they will receive approval. When one starts a relationship, they can’t pick and choose the parts they want to date like they would cut off the bad parts of an orange before eating it. If the other person wants to change a behaviour, they should count on your full support, the same way they shouldn’t be pressured to do so on your part. 

Think of a moment when your parents tried to make you do something you didn’t want to do, like for example study law instead of philosophy, because it will “open more doors”. Well, it doesn’t work like that. You need to find what you like and if you see your parents reasoning and decide that studying law would truly make you happier, then you should go ahead and do that, but because you want to. With the confidence that one has a safe stable net to fall back on should things turn out for the worst.

And that is the importance of unconditional love; finding a safe space for acceptance, grace, and improvement. It’s okay to make mistakes, everyone does, and it doesn’t make us any less deserving of love. Circling back to being independent oranges, humans are a package, like the mystery packages that are sold on Etsy. One can either accept or reject that package, but not pick and choose what comes in it. When one commits themselves to another, they must accept the full package. That is why it is so important to not rush getting into a relationship, getting to know each other, and bearing in mind at all times that you accepted a person, which is more complex than a package from IKEA. 

All of this to say that maybe if I hadn’t grown to resent those traits of mine I would be able to seek validation in myself, not be half an orange. I would be able to not hold them so close to my identity, simply accept that mistakes are human, and look for a solution instead of writing an essay about oranges at 1 a.m. like I just discovered sliced bread.