Are You Searching for Love?

One guy said that one must be willing to die for the person one is "in love with" or it isn't "true love." Another bloke said that love is about seeing yourself in another person. I beg to differ, especially with the first guy.

Most people assume they want "love," that love is something to be desired. I think that they get this from watching too many movies and being heavily socialized by a culture that perpetually manipulates and covers the truth with pretty and false surfaces.

I think that what people want underneath all of the jargon and lies is something quite different. What people want is something I'll call "profound companionship." One of the reasons that this gets so easily compounded with what is known as "love" is that some special ways of achieving "profound companionship" are through various activities that can often fall prey to the culture of the romantic (like sex). Sexuality, of course, is not necessarily romantic at all (sometimes quite the opposite). On a certain level, sex is merely an activity, however pleasurable, for making offspring (and this is more clearly the case with many other species).

What I see as the most desirable connection with another human being is not the romance seen in the movies, but rather, a kind of mutual seeing yourself in another person that allows for a very rare form of interpersonal understanding. It's the kind of "love" that would comfort you in the toughest times because you know that at least one person, besides any family members, understands you on the most profound levels. Understandably, this kind of connection is very rare and probably happens more with close friends. This is obviously a very personal take on love that relates to my own identity strongly. However I will take the liberty to say that it is a prevalent feeling among people despite how unlikely that seems. Just think to yourself: if you die, how do you want to be remembered by the one who knew you the best? Do you want to be just another person out of many friends or do you want to be someone who was understood on a special level that is rarely achieved? Do your friendships/relationships matter to you on this level? Everyone's different.

The Ladies Man, in his feature film of the same title, read a poem that goes "Is not love not unlike the unlikely not it is unlikened to?" I think this quote could very well represent the kind of strange, almost perverted, confusion that goes into most peoples' idealization of love. They want that sort of romance that could be found in a Disney movie. The truth is that nothing really human ever happens in those movies. There are no bathroom scenes like those in the comedies "Dumb and Dumber" and "There's Something about Mary," there are rarely any diaper-changing scenes, etc.. The dirty, less pretty sides of life are almost always filtered out. (Raising children, for example.) To put it briefly, young people tend to obsess over romance and the kind of "love" they see in the movies. I am guessing this changes, for most people, sometime in the late-twenties or mid-thirties when (I've noticed) people, all of a sudden, seem to become a lot more practical, and a lot less romantic. (Not to say that romantic older people do not exist).

Of course I am still but a youngling of my species and I do not pretend to hold all the answers. To the contrary - I see myself as just one trying to cope and trying to learn through experience. I like to call my form of understanding an attempt of phenomenology - an understanding that explains experience through how things are experienced rather than through opaque metaphors and terminology. But most likely I make the same mistakes with language, cliches, etc that most everyone does. Then again, who cares? This is a time of decadence - a time when clear thinking is not only rare but rarely demanded for, when self-understanding is just another word in a self-improvement book, and when everyone can have a voice, no matter how unskilled they may be at speaking that voice. So I easily become forgiven (as a matter of fact I can just forgive myself right now). I do appreciate the democratic-ness of it all; if only the so-called equality could be matched with an understanding, pro-active populace that could demand better leadership.