Love

Photo by Rakicevic Nenad (Pexels)

I have been putting this off for quite some time and against the advice of the overthinking part of my brain, I am still looking for an excuse so I can postpone thinking about this topic forevermore. Nevertheless, procrastination has never been my strong suit, so I don’t have as much of a choice as I believe.

However, it is nearly as if there is a block in my mind stopping me from thinking about it. The same goes for the love aspect of my life as well. I can’t truly think it about since I am constantly trying to deny its existence or forget it completely. Sometimes it is even accidental since I just don’t have time to think about it so right now, I am not sure if it is the best idea to force myself to think about it or not, but I digress.

Funnily enough, to beat this writer’s block I had to force myself to set a deadline and stick to it. This may mean the quality of this article is lacking and everything feels forced but that is the price I pay for wanting to procrastinate in the first place.

Therefore, I set the deadline before Valentine’s Day because that day is an annual festival to celebrate romantic love, friendship and admiration. Besides it is considered unlucky to celebrate any festival before the actual date so in this case, it is actually better later than sooner.

Let´s start this article off on a high note. First, I would like to point out that love is just a feeling and as we all know feelings never last. This may sound cold of me, but I have never experienced lasting feelings much less lasting strong emotional feelings. At the end of the day, they always fade or we get used to them which make them less intense.

When I do share this very unpopular opinion of mine, people always counter with the fact that I just haven’t found the one yet, which is something I cannot deny since I am currently not in a relationship and am currently not looking for anyone. Nevertheless, I still find the idea of the one so weird. How does anyone even know which one is the one?

There is no sign of confirmation when someone has found the one. Unlike chemical reactions, where the existence of a product can be proven through some experiments. There is nothing that can prove that a relationship was meant to be, and the test of time just seems too time-consuming.

To me, it just seems like trotting the world trying to find the one is just a waste of time since the one might not even exist or at least statistically speaking it is unlikely to meet them since there are seven billion people on earth. Even if you would only consider a certain group of people for instance people currently living in the country you are living in, roughly your age, a specific gender, etc…

In the movie “how to be single”, there is a scene that describes the specific limitations of dating perfectly.

After setting some limits to the people you are willing to date, you probably need to meet each and everyone from those thousands of people to figure out if the choice you make is correct. How can anyone know if one found the one if one didn’t meet all the options first?

At the very same time, people change over the passage of time so the one you fell in love with is probably not the one after ten years or so. To be frank, neither will you. You certainly won´t stay the same over the course of your life, so why should your partner? However, my question is then how can you still love a person you didn’t initially fall in love with?

Frankly, it is nearly impossible to find the perfect one since there will always be attributes that you might not like about the person you consider the one. For instance, small annoyances you might have not noticed when you first met them. After a while, those small annoyances might drive you crazy and you are left wondering how come you didn’t notice it.

This is where love becomes a hindrance since love makes you blind. A brain in love always makes everyone you are feeling attracted to seem perfect since otherwise the perfect persona will be shattered. Generally, it is easier to fall in love with perfection rather than something flawed.

Now is probably a great time to ask who hurt me in the past since no one can be this cynical without concrete evidence or experience. The truth is that no one did. No one ever hurt me before in a romantic relationship since I have never been in a relationship before, and it is hard to get hurt by something that has never happened.

Frankly, I never put in too much thought about being in a relationship in the first place since I am always so distracted by everything else. As a teenager, there may have been a dream or two about how cool it would be to have a boyfriend. However, growing up just showed me that sometimes dreams are better off as dreams since reality never matches up with dreams and one will just end up disappointed. Currently, I am living through one disappointment after another is already enough, I don’t need to add another disappointment on top of all that. It will just be like adding fire to an easily burnable pile of wood.

Going into a relationship there are always certain expectations set by oneself, others, and media if those expectations are not met a relationship might fall apart or one can do the mature thing of working it out but if emotions are involved the mature way is never the chosen way.

At the very same time, going into a relationship without any expectations might not lead to disappointment but it might lead to manipulations. One does not know what to expect so if the partner decides to take advantage of that naivety, a lot of issues will arise.

One can also go into a relationship with the right expectations and experience to make things work but it could end up not working because of the experience already gathered. A partner is certainly not a person to dump all one’s issues on or someone you constantly compare with crushes from the past. No matter how hard you try to ignore it, you will always compare your partner with someone you already know.

Another reason I never think too much about relationships is also that I know myself and know what I can and will do. For instance, I get bored easily and what do I do when I do get bored? Do something else instead. This not only happens with hobbies but with people too and I can only imagine how much some are going to get hurt if I just straight out forget the existence of the relationship.

Personally, I have no idea why exactly I have this point of view but in my opinion, I have little to no power over it to change it due to the backfire effect. When presented with an opposing argument my mind instinctually strengthens my opinion whether I am right or wrong which is a stupid effect come to think of it since that way we are all living in the tiny little bubble we believe to be true unwilling to learn more.

However, in the case of the four letters I hate to spell, there is no right nor wrong. Love is a feeling and feelings vary from person to person, which means opinions vary from person to person, which at the end of the day just means no groups can be formed proclaiming that love is one thing or another. There is no definite answer to what love is and my opinion on it will be just as indefinite.

At the end of the day, love is just a feeling deeply connected with experience since opinions can change with one bad experience with it. Come to think of it everything is deeply connected with experience, which one bad experience can ruin.

Maybe I am just too invested in the scientist mindset to realise that I am always comparing love with a machine in one’s mind which will be calibrated each time one believes one is experiencing love.

Sometimes I would even become a wannabe stockbroker to please the financial person in my mind by comparing love to the stock market. Every potential prospect is a stock but unlike the real stock market, you can’t buy multiple stocks. If you believe you found the perfect person, you go all in. Some prospects make the initial investment pay off, some may take some time before becoming profitable and some may never pay off. Just like the real stock market, you don’t truly know but you can use algorithms based on past relationships to attempt making accurate predictions even though it will be only predictions and never be reality.

Now that I am thinking about it, I believe I understand my view of love. I always considered it to be a weakness of some sort. You don’t lose anything if you don’t care about anything. If you care about something deeply and it is taken away from you, you will get hurt badly.

By presuming that love is an unwanted side effect of human nature, it just becomes significantly easier to navigate this already complicated world where around every corner something will hurt you. Why would anyone want to endure more pain than necessary?

Even by laying my opinion of mine out in the open, I still don’t want to change that opinion. Even knowing what effect is working against me, I still don’t want anything to change. It is as much a defence mechanism as it is a necessity at this point. Hurt before you get hurt. Leave before you get left. Defend before you get attacked.

Science does not make embracing love easy either. Since it seems that scientists are spitting out facts about love every day and I tend to only read the negatives rather than the positive (backfire effect). For instance, being in love makes you a less productive person. I feel worthless if I am not productive so if I have to choose it will be productivity, always.

Another fact is that one should never express too much love, affection, or care for someone because it is human tendency to underestimate anything free of cost. And that love has to be mutual otherwise there will be some disparity that leads to a bad relationship.

When one does end up in a loving relationship, then it can get exhausting showing affection while balancing the rest of the world on your shoulders. It is easy to take the partner for granted if one is stressed.  However, you must keep in mind that you need to value the person who loves you because once you lose that person it is never exactly the same person who comes back.

Another thing that bothered me when I thought about what love is, what is considered romantic or what is considered a relationship is that I always draw my ideas from movies that have a tendency to end happily. It does not take a genius to point out that real life does not always end happily. The movies we intake just derail our idea of love by letting us set impossible standards to real-life prospects and frankly that can only end badly.

I just guess that the idea of love is just way too complicated for my already clouded mind to handle therefore I paint a bad picture of it so I won´t feel guilty for ignoring it. However, even if it might not seem like it, I do like to end an article on a neutral or positive note but since I am incapable of being positive about love, I let educators from TED-Ed do it with their ‘Love, Actually’ playlist.

I really do hope that I didn’t make whoever read this article a cynic like me since do believe that people are capable of love and love can actually be quite beautiful if you truly found it. It is like the cave of wonders, hard to find but once you found it your life is changed forever.

Disclaimer: In this article, I just wanted to write down my thoughts so I can understand what I am thinking about better. I did not write this to convince anyone of anything (I truly hope that I didn’t convince anyone of my opinion). I just wanted to understand my point of view.