When do you really care about someone?

When do you really care about someone? There are numerous formal ways to express caring, like romance or public displays of affection, or other rituals. But I think the only one that really shows it means something is being willing to spend intimate time with another person. To check your ego, to check cynicism for a bit, and feel the other person's presence. To mutually grow as people, to let deep affects resonate between you and letting that fill your life with energy. We are stuck in an exhausted, cynical, egoistic paradigm, and don't realize that our energy comes from our relationships to the world and to other people. We do not possess this energy, any more than we possess the time that we live our lives in. That tempo and rhythm is something that exists between people, not something that is just abstract or purely individual.

The time 'invested' in our relationships on caring for another person is regained with a 'surplus,' but it's hard to measure exactly how much. But rest assured, if you feel better and do things faster, and with more energy, it should make up for itself in the end. If you care. That's what makes relationships and love so uncertain and risky, but also meaningful. You will feel how intimacy and love affect other areas of your life positively, but will rarely be able to calculate exactly how this related to an initial effort. Without taking a chance, though, you may not realize important aspects of your potential self, such as improving emotional memory and the ability to resist stressers. A relationship can be part of your broader support network, and many people in relationships do share friends. If either person doesn't want to public displays of affection or bourgeois romance, that is fine; it's unnecessary, since the only 'duty' or 'commitment' should be to respond to the other person when you are able to.

If someone says they don't have enough time for a relationship, I think it has more to do with trust, like not feeling comfortable to be intimate, or not wanting to expose yourself beyond a certain comfort zone. I get that everyone feels vulnerable, and some more than others, but I also think it's a bad idea to only think about self-preservation. Constructive self-criticism can help in development, and relationships can definitely reveal areas we need to improve, as well as reveal surprising things about how we are developing.

You really care about someone when you are willing (and ready) to spend the qualitative time to feel intimate with them. It is not a contract or an investment. You can set limits, but you can't exactly define where it will go. However, there are real advantages to seeing risks as chances.