In true love, there is fairness and balance. Love is not just liking someone. There must be communication, understanding and compromising. - Dicky Cheung Wai Kin

Communication.

That's the basis for all sorts of expression of feelings, of thoughts, of sensations. You communicate through words, through tonality, through volume, through sounds, through facial expressions, through smells, through sight.

Communication is the basis for understanding. Even a rock standing alone amidst the crashing waves can express a thought or a theme, or even a feeling, which can lead to understanding something.

There have been so many times, where I've seen people in relationships getting more-than-merely-angry with each other; there have been many times where presumptions and assumptions have led to the breakdown of many good relationships.

Where is the talking? Where is the understanding? Where is the communication?

Think about how many times you have not allowed someone - your other half, your siblings, your friends, whoever - to try explaining something just because you were angry at a presumed and assumed misunderstanding in the first place? And then, after you've calmed down and either that same person - or another - explained the situation to you, you feel stupid and regretful that you didn't slow down to allow the person to explain his/her side of things?

I've been guilty of not communicating many times in the past. And even now, my level and depth of talking can be increased so that many hurts could have been avoided in the first place.

Still, we both try. Az and I have a lot of issues between us, not the least which involves religions/faiths/beliefs. It's not that we don't respect each other, or each other's faith. In fact, we respect each other a lot, especially on those. It's just that both of us are simply unable to see the other faith from the believer's perspective.

That is a high-risk area for both of us. There are so many things between us, on the basis of faiths, that can be misconstructed and misinterpreted, if none of us had taken the trouble to sit down, sometimes day-after-day, to talk about it, to discuss, to offer our own perspectives, our own explanations. And what each of us requests, is merely the respect given, that even if one of us don't believe in the other's faith, we'll respect that he/she believes in it. And that is enough.

Communication.

At this point, once you've gotten beyond your willingness to communicate, there is another more subtle issue: the angle of communication and the depth of it.

For both of us, yes, we spent days discussing about the issue regarding religion. But things still broke down a little between us. We talked, so why? Why did things become so strained, still?

We were going about in circles, understanding, but evading the real point, evading the crux of the matter: whether two faiths can co-exist, with respect as their bridge. We tried too hard - consciously or otherwise - to make the other see things from our own perspective, forgetting for the moment that faiths and beliefs are two of the hardest ingrained things to change, because they shape our lives, and they shape who we are, who we want to be.

With willing communication, must come depth, angle, and finally, retro-/introspection.

We realized that we'd taken the wrong approach to talking about this particular issue, and have discussed a new approach, that we're willing to work upon.

Perhaps that was what salvaged things - and maybe, even this relationship - in the end.