loss and ownership

in my previous entry i wrote about the fear of loss leading one to take a vow of solitude. i said that doesn't work for me, but i wasn't specific about why, which takes 2 forms. first, i just need contact and companionship, plain and simple. friends, family, and pets are great, but being intimate with someone special is important to me. this leads to the second thing, though: i think we tend to throw around a word like "loss" without considering its implications. the most basic implication of "loss" is, of course, something to lose, which means ownership. so while i understand the fear of loss, and *feel* that fear very acutely sometimes, i want to resist letting myself be ruled by it, because i think it's a product of a fucked-up aspect of how we think about relationships, companionship, and intimacy in the u.s. we have so many mechanisms for marking out a territory around a significant other, and then pressuring that person to stay within those boundaries, that i think we lose sight of what's really important: enjoying the person for who they are and how you interact (including negotiations over disagreements), for as long as the person and the interaction are enjoyable [maybe "enjoyable" isn't the best word...would "rewarding" work better? both sound really trite...]. this isn't to say that i have a fatalistic attitude toward relationships, because i don't, or at least i don't think i do. anyway, just some musings...