Stories // Sugar

“After speaking to a few people about this, it hit me that love is like you’re walking around naked all of the time, but only one person can see you naked."

Sugar is one of the most analytical humans that I’ve ever met. Em and I teamed up with him to hike up Table Mountain along the Kirstenbosch trail, and our four-hour trek to the top turned into a philosophical rant that hit every major controversial topic. And it was pretty awesome.

Sugar is a big-picture thinker that makes you want to discuss major problems in the world, and feel a sense of responsibility beyond your own life to contribute to helping. He is an artist. A romantic. A man who speaks as colorfully as he thinks. After our hike, I just sat in my room and attempted to digest our conversations.

There’s something incredible about being able to connect on a social, political, and philosophical level with someone who has had a vastly different life from you on the other side of the planet. His mantra is “we are all just people”; we’re all fundamentally similar in more ways than we treat each other. Connection between different people seemed to be one of his greatest fascinations, and it reflects in the art exhibitions that he works on to conceptualize this.

One that I found particularly interesting was a project he did on “love.” He would ask people three questions:

1. What is love?

2. How do you know that you’re in love?

3. Are you in love?

If someone answered “yes” to the third question, he asked a couple of follow-ups:

-Who are you in love with?

-What do you receive from the relationship? What do you give?

-Do you feel that love is healthy?

He’s fascinated by what love drives people to do and how that feeling pulls out extremes in people in different ways. It’s funny because you get lost in the answers to these questions because they’re hard to conceptualize, intensely personal, and simplistic answers don’t quite do it justice. Sugar has listened to people go on rants and talk in circles whenever he posed these questions to his subjects, and honestly I pretty much did the same thing when he put me on the spot.

As an employee of an international backpackers hostel, Sugar meets people from all over the world. He asks these questions to people from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds. When I asked what conclusions he’s drawn so far from all of the people he’s talked to, he left me with a few common threads:

-People see dependency as a negative part of love and something to be careful about

-People stress the importance of focusing on yourself, and being able to mesh with your partner while also differentiating yourself

-Deep “trust” in the other person – when you’re with and without them – is important if not imperative

-People struggle to define it; there doesn’t seem to be an agreed-upon definition

-Vulnerability. Vulnerability. Vulnerability.

I would say that most people would not be shocked by any of these themes, but nonetheless it's still fascinating how (romantic) love is seen as a universal concept that everyone has the capacity to experience. Still, no two people can describe it the same way in that we've put words and definitions to other emotions, such as happiness, sadness, and anger. Ask someone the three simply-worded questions above and prepare to listen to a lengthy and fascinating response. Also, Sugar's ear muffs are dope -- thanks for the good talks, man!