Love - a cynical view
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
I know that there is already an article about this topic, but I just thought I missed a lot of points. It is a nice well written article, that describes love as THE feeling to have. But have you ever had a thought about what love actually does to you? A normal, sensible, responsible person turns into hormone ridden monster, that doesn´t care at all about the rest of the world (despite their "target" that is). And it is not just the hormones that make us that way, our very own emotions send us on a high-speed roller-coaster without a seat belt. You don´t believe me? Read on i am going to try and explain it to you using examples from my own experiences with this wonderful feeling. Some of the titles may seem very hard, but I hope you will get the point in the end.
What is love?
Now if you look at it real close, love is nothing more than a couple of emotions linked together, mixed with a good measure of hormones. The silly thing about it is, that taken most of the emotions on their own results in someone feeling down, but they all thrown together make up the feeling know as love. Maybe it is just another example of minus x minus equals plus.
CURIOSITY
Curiosity sounds funny, but still it has ver much to do with love. Now think about your past, when you were about 13-15 years old, the first time you dated somebody. The first time going out (possibly to cinema, last row, where nobody would see you kissing), having a date, sitting in some dumb diner/restaurant/fast-food place, with nothing to say to her or him. What drove you there? Remember real hard, you were just plain curious. You wanted to find out what it was like, to be with that person, to do all the stuff the guys/girls were talking about in the locker-room. You did not care about your partner at all, al you wanted was to find out how it was, how it felt. Or is there anybody out there, who says that he was actually in love with his first (second, third) date? I dont think so.
What has this to do with love then? Look at you now, whenever you meet somebody of the opposite sex and start spending more and more time with each other, you now say that you are interested in that person. Interested in his/her feelings, thoughts and life. If you boil that down you are just plain curious.
CLOSENESS
Not a bad thing either. Or is there a down side to it? Anyway we all know what is meant with that. Because both partners are curious (or interested) about each other, they want to know a lot of things. You keep talkign for hours on end, about life, death, friends and whatever else comes to your mind. Sooner or later you have to start talking about your feelings. Either because you run out of topics, or because your partner (or yourself) directs the conversation in this direction.
Again we have to remember how it what when we were young(er). Do you remember how it was to say "I love you" for the first and mean it? Three words, but very, very hard to say. You have to lean very far out of the window to do that. You leave your innermost feelings wide open for an "attack". Even if your partner just says something like "I didn´t get it the music is so loud.." or anything else that is not meant badly, you will be very disappointed.
This just means that love makes us vulnerable. The ironic thing is, especially if two persons are in love with each other (and its not that kind of one way road love thing), they become most vulnerable by the persons that loves them.
DESTRUCTION
Not exactly an emotion, but one of the major side-effects of love. Your priorities just start to shift. No more boozing with your mates. No more cruising for chicks on a friday night. No more fun stuff? Not really , as I said your priorities just start to change.
Remember one of those conversations (man, I never thought I would use that word in this context) with your buddies, after one of them did not show up because he wanted to stay with his new lady (all females out there ask a mal about that, they will know what I mean)?. When all of you were going "She is not good for him", "She even tells him to change his underwear", "He is not the same person anymore", "She has taken our friend away"? Do you recall anything like that?
There you have it, you were angry at your friend because he was in love. What did you do? If you wouldn´t have called you up a couple of days, normally you would have called him just to check if he is allright. But now? Now he has got that bitch (please excuse the language, but this reality), who takes care of him now. You are not good enough anymore for him.
Which basically means: Your friendship has been destroyed. You are not meeting up anymore, there is almost no contact at all. If it does not follow this pattern, then your buddies relationship is at an end. Or she will tag along all the time. Which would mean no more men´s talk, which then means that you would start to break of contact.
Conclusion: Love destroys.
SEX
I dont want to waste too much time on this part here. Others have written better articles on sex than I ever could. So here is just in nutshel, what I mean.
Sex is part of a relationship and therefore part of love. Agreed? Allrighty, now how often have you heard the sentence "Oh, he is so cute" or "Look at his body" (I am not going that far and write what men would say. I guess the afore mentioned topic was embarassing enough). All those physical traits. Mother Nature gave them to us, as well as that we like certain physical traits and others not, to ensure that our race would not die out. Good physical condition, means good chance to survive. Howewver survival has nothing to do with love. Sex is a nice thing, but it should never be the basis for a relationship. If it is, then you are screwed (excuse the pun). Sex is sort of like football (soccer that is), it is very nice, fun, relaxing, healthy and all sorts of other things, but if you get carried away with it, good luck.
HABIT
This is the result of curiousity. You know a lot about each other, you understand your partner without words. You like him/her being around.
You are used to not being alone. You do not think about your or his/her feelings anymore, because you are together, why should anything change?. This is also quite ironic, two persons, curious and interested about the other one, reach the point where the partner is still around but is quite boring. No more talk about love, no more romantic evenings, candle-light dinners etc. Every day life has caught up with you.
Looking at the relationships my friends are having, it sometimes occurs to me that they were just still together because of habit and convenience. Looking at my relationships, I can say I was.
And again there is some very bitter irony in here. If you love somebody you get used to them, you only miss what you are used to having. Remember the time before you first fell in love? You missed mommy and daddy and maybe your pet and your best friend. But loneliness? That was unknown to you. This means basically that love causes loneliness...Ironic don´t you think?
And now?
I wrote that article on piece of paper (yep, these things still exist) first and gave it friend of mine to proof read it. It took him almost three weeks.
In the meantime a lot of things have changed in my life. I hopped onto the love-roller-coaster again and this time decided to take the trip without a seatbelt and standing upright.... At the time of writing I meant this article as it is written. Now I cannot say that anymore, it is more a feeling like "love is weird if you take a rational look, but hey I am a human being not Mr Spock ;)"
All I would like to say is: If your girl/boyfriend just left you, read this article, feel better about yourself, because you are not an idiot, you just fell for a completely normal sequence of emotions/events as all of us do.
If life is as good as it gets for you at the moment, even better, read the article, have a laugh post, something regarding me being an idiot and give your spouse a hug. Because that is what I am going to do now.
