To my friends:
Let's talk about love.
We in the prime of our youth, I believe, have a responsibility to ourselves to resist short-sightedness. Love and relationships, those ever-fascinating things which have been the topic of many an Elite Daily article, are important to talk about because they affect lifelong decisions, so, short-sightedness in these areas is a danger to be avoided. Also, I think that we’re all just secretly obsessed with thinking about love.
I believe that our proclivity to romanticize is the root cause of our love life misery. We romanticize people, we romanticize relationships, we romanticize love itself. This is all very well for the Hollywood and pop music industries, but not so much for our mental and emotional health. It's time to start facing reality now.
1. Putting someone on a pedestal is toxic.
Idealizing another person is a result of thinking about them so much that they are no longer a living, breathing human being so much as a prisoner of your mind, an imaginary and perfected entity, a sad shadow of the real thing. We take what we know about someone and fill in the blanks ourselves — and what we fill in depends a lot upon what movies we've seen, what books we've read, what our idea of perfection is.
The experiences we have had in our lifetime shape and determine the ideas that we are capable of conceiving. In this way, ideas are limited. So if we can only view someone through the lens of the idea of that person, our perception of them is, inevitably, limited. And our idea of them will exclude much of who that person really is. Is that really what they deserve? Does anyone deserve to be seen as anything other than who they are?
That person ceases to become a person, because we used our imagination to construct a character. But they are not one-dimensional characters in a movie starring you. They are the protagonists of their own narratives, one that began long before you, and there exist parts of them that you could never have imagined in those blanks you tried to fill. They exist on their own, outside of your mind. They exist beyond.
2. Romantic relationships should never be a life goal.
Are our lives centered around finding and being in a romantic relationship? Just take a look at the billion-dollar wedding industry, the normalization of lifelong monogamy, the fact that we rarely hear the word "married" without "happily" attached to the front of it. Why are we so convinced that real, true happiness can be found in a single relationship with a single person?
It's a very modern thing, I believe, the idea that marriage should be based on love. If you are looking for someone who makes you happy — worse, commit to them because they make you happy — the relationship will ultimately fail. Happiness is a feeling; feelings are fickle and temporary, emotions unreliable and out of your control.
Relationships aren't all bad, as long as we don't search for the wrong things. Being young and short-sighted, we tend to make choices based on short-term rewards; we prioritize feeling happy and not wanting to be alone. These things are great, but they don't last, and you can satisfy these things with other aspects of your life, such as friendships and family and self-determination. In a romantic relationship, prioritize partnership. Prioritize emotional stability. Prioritize financial stability too, if you have to, but don't look for love.
3. Love isn't real.
Romantic love is a curious thing, because unlike any other love — familial love, friendship — it just might not be real. Romantic love is curious because not only does it rely on fantasy, on the magical windings of imagination and clever invention made possible by the human mind, it holds fantasy at its very core and cannot exist without it. It only exists if you believe in it, and you must be open to love in order to find it in the first place (and if the existence of something is conditional, can it exist objectively, really?).
Romantic love is constructed. Yet somehow, we've all been made to believe that it's just something that just happens to us one day, catching us unawares like a storm on a sunny day. We believe that the feeling of being "in love" exists out there, somewhere; and that our soulmates exist out there, somewhere, just waiting to share that feeling with us. Worse, we believe that this feeling is somehow sustainable, and that it can carry our relationships for as long as a lifetime.
Love does not exist as a feeling. Love is an action, something you have control over once the feeling is gone, something that must be done as deliberately and consistently as making the bed every morning. We do not find our soulmates. We create them.
