Hate is a strong word, but I hated the idea of love. There was nothing admirable about giving your life up for someone, nothing sweet about waiting for someone who wasn’t coming back. It was idealism at its’ extreme, a futile attempt at fairy tales and happy ever afters.
However, I often found myself in situations where someone has confided in me about their love life. Their yearning for a girl that won’t love them back, a guy who they liked but they knew they were never their type. Everything was a competition, texting timings, lovelorn watching, rapid swiping, falling, falling, falling.
I felt like an exasperated viewer watching playthroughs of all the wrong paths. Comments I didn’t publish consisted of:
“it’s been four years, what are you even waiting for?”
“someone doesn’t need a fist to inflict harm.”
“telepathy is not the only means to communication. talk.”
“the grand gesture can only bridge the half gap between your souls if they don’t meet you in the middle.”
After watching people dent their teeth on the curb of eros and phileo, a privilege we only got when our lives were already practical and didn’t need another partner to make it through, I didn’t want to stain my hands with the wax of a candle burned too bright and too fast for the sake of the thrill of five seconds of limelight.
Rather, I used the forest fires of the chaos around me to direct me away from the emotional turmoil and into the cold hard rational lines of logic, of cynical, of understanding that romance isn’t worth the pain of tearing your soul over and over to bind to another in a fruitless idealistic hope of gaining a sense of connectedness for just moment.
We only think we fall in love for the neurotransmitters to fire rapidly enough so we can form deep sense of emotional attachments and reward that compels us to breed enough children to cover the face of the earth. We get a high each time we see someone we think we love because its our body telling us it’s easier to survive together to fend off predators. There is a longing to see them because your body naturally hates loneliness and the societal pressures views alone as outwanted and outcast eventually pressuring you subconsciously to fit a mold.
I thought I knew all there was to it.
But I was a teenager. They were teenagers. It was a teen love, a young Eros, Phileo love. A bulb of actually understanding a relationship beyond a quarter of its purpose.
I may have woken up earlier, but I still haven’t gotten out of bed until it was time for someone to pull off the covers.
Love isn’t just fluffy emotional fulfillment and attachments, nor intense physical intimacies, but it’s not cold hard pragma either. It’s all of those and more.
It’s learning to be rational about situations, yet hopeful that it will be okay eventually. It’s learning that there wouldn’t be any eventual benefit or gratefulness out of things but you still do it anyways. It’s something you have to do together, as long as the other person does it 40-60% of the time too. It’s knowing when and how much to give, and when and how much to take.
Love is…growth. It’s mature, it’s adulthood, and it’s fulfillment.
It should be a model of the perfect love God gives to us imperfect beings. It’s Agape. And it’s beautiful.
Trix Does Stuff 