Love. Being in love. It´s weird. Everywhere you go, love (and I mean romantic love) is presented as one of the most amazing, valuable and beautiful things that exist. But is it really? From my experience love makes you blind. Not completely, but enough to make you suppress, overlook or simply accept the negative characteristics of a person, which in retrospect restrained and restricted you in every possible way.
When the love is new you feel like you´re the happiest person on earth, that you found your soul mate and that you could stay with him/her forever. Everything seems to be perfect, but when the initial feelings fade, you start noticing the adverse features of your partner. So you start analyzing your relationship, figuring out how you two work together as a couple and making compromises to make your relationship work.
But by the time you finally go separate ways you realize how much better you are without him/her. I´m not saying you shouldn´t have had the relationship in the first place, because getting as close to a person as you do in a romantic relationship helps you grow and get to know yourself better immensely, but as mentioned above this kind of love makes you blind and ignore all the reasons why your relationship at some point stops benefitting you.
And isn´t love actually only a projection of our desires onto another person? I mean, we all have certain ideas and desires, but we don’t specifically know what it is we want. So we go into a relationship because we unconsciously think we are going to get what it is we are missing in ourselves through the other person. Thereby we are not in love with the actual person, but with the character we want them to be in our life.
Maybe this perspective is too negative though and I should look at it from a different angle. Two people feel attracted and fall in love because they bring out the best in each other. They help themselves become a more ideal self because both partners influence each other positively in the way that they adopt the most beneficial quality of the other person. But what happens then? We get accustomed to them, we know how they act in different situations and at some point we feel there is nothing else to discover, nothing else to learn from the other person, nothing else no gain. Is enjoying the other person company enough to stay together forever? Or are we always in search of experience and growth so that it is almost impossible for us to stay with another person over many years or even till the rest of our life?
You bring up some rather interesting questions about love.
I suppose romantic love is a very controversial topic in general once you start to take to think about it.
Suffice to say that I´ve done a fair amount of thinking on it over the years, so I´d like to apologize in advance if this turns into an incoherent ramble of a text. I don´t think this is going to do all the thoughts I have on the matter justice, because I´d probably end up writing a plus-30 page essay if I tried to put all of my ideas, theories and resolutions into a stringent piece of writing.
I agree with you on the, in my opinion, ever-present advertisement of romantic love as “the greatest thing to ever exist” etc.
It´s not. Or rather it shouldn´t be, because it doesn´t seem like a healthy mindset. Sure, romantic love can add a certain something to life but it´s not like it´s impossible to lead a happy and fulfilled life without a partner (contrary to popular belief…). Single people aren´t broken or doomed to be miserable. I think the whole concept of love society is currently trying to sell is a bit unhealthy, to be honest. I wouldn´t want to attempt to have a relationship with anyone who whole-heartedly believes that they´re only “whole” and “enough” as long as they have a partner. Love doesn´t magically fix everything, nor does it guarantee eternal happiness, that´s not what it´s about. It´s more of a decision along the lines of “I´m me and I´m perfectly happy on my own, but I CHOOSE to be me WITH you.”
And if somebody needs a relationship to feel like they deserve to love themselves they aren´t exactly in a mental space that allows romantic love to bloom out of the blossom that is the initial infatuation many people confuse with love.
Attraction and infatuation are the primary actors behind the scenes during the first couple of weeks/months of a relationship and our brains get flooded with all kinds of happy-go-lucky hormones because it´s a very handy evolutionary mechanism that encourages procreation. From a scientific viewpoint, infatuation looks very much like a form of (temporary) addiction.
And I´m going to draw the line of this comment here because I don´t want to slip into a full-on monologue about the science behind it all.
As a favorite author of mine once phrased it: “Reason is good servant, but a bad master.”
I´m looking forward to reading your thoughts on my take on “love”
I think I have too little experience to really judge about love, but then again I am only speaking based upon the experience I´ve already made and the things I observe, such as everybody else. I don´t know if my evaluation and interpretation of my observations are correct, but that’s why I´m here, that’s why I like to always think about what I see and feel and why I try to get in contact with other people, to hear about their thoughts and ideas. I am searching for a key or anything that helps me understand the world, human relationships and the life we live better.
“I´m me and I´m perfectly happy on my own, but I choose to be with you” to me feels like the ideal “way” or mentality to decide on committing a relationship. But I am still wondering if anybody is actually able to be completely happy and satisfied by themselves? Aren´t we all lacking something? Feeling that something is missing?
And what´s the key to an everlasting relationship between two people? Maybe precisely because they would be perfectly happy just on their own, but they enjoy each others company and their personalities fit together well, they decide on spending their lives together. But how do we reach that stage of complete “self-love” or “self-satisfaction”?
Where is it to be found? Do I have to have had a specific experience or can I only find it within myself? Is everybody even able to reach that stage or is it only given to specific people? Can these questions be answered at all or does everyone have to figure it out but themselves?
I have so many questions, so many thoughts and so many things I wonder about and wished I had a clear answer to. But maybe that´s the purpose of life. Experience, failure, insight, knowledge, questioning, analyzing, awareness…