This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at MUJ chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.
If the whole world played a game of mind meld, the first word we’d probably settle on would be ‘love’.
When I was just a wee boy, I liked picking up random side quests — wrestling a wild goat, solving world hunger, beating my sister’s high score on Purble Place, you know, casual stuff. Then one fine summer morning, I noticed something strange: grown-ups, with all their wisdom and taxes, were still struggling with love.
It was the main plot of almost every book, movie, show, heck, even Spider-Man wrestles with the intricacies of love. So, as a small favour to Spider-Man (for teaching me that nerds can also be cool superheroes), I cracked my knuckles, gave a little tsk to Shakespeare and Rumi for wasting their entire lives on such a “trivial” problem, and set out to solve love myself. Little did I know this would become the longest, most gruelling side quest of all. To say the least, I’m sorry, Shakespeare; I understand why this one made you lose half your hair.
Here’s the treacherous terrain of dilemmas I crossed on my quest to solve love.
The Norms of Conformity
Most love channels through relationships and the way we define them. The Greeks went so far as to divide them into types: eros for passion, philia for friendship, storge for family, and agape for selfless devotion. But at the core, aren’t they all the same?
Like if the gates of my heart were opened, would love flow out of different compartments for philia, eros, and storge?
I mean, almost all of us got our first kiss from our mums, on the cheek, of course, because kissing your mom on the lips is seen as strange. Yet kissing on the lips itself is believed by anthropologists to have originated from mouth-feeding, something mothers once did and in some places still do. Strange, isn’t it, how quickly the norm shifts? Love might be universal and intrinsic, but the ways we project it, the rules of what belongs where are just norms we conform to.
What to look for in someone for love
A lot of idiots over the years of my life bug me with this exact question: What do I have to offer for someone to love me? It reeks of a capitalist mindset that love is somehow transactional.
I don’t know man, a heart? You can now buy empathy for the low price of basic kindness at your local Walmart.
Looks?
I won’t lie, I’m only human, and I do notice the societal standards of who passes for unlovable or adored by all. And sadly, I’m not immune to my biology.
But I’ve learnt over my years to look beyond it. To notice that every one of us, in our essence, is made of love. And how can anything that is made of love be anything but lovely?
There is a recurring phrase I say to people when they feel insecure about their appearance, which is mostly just to myself.
“You’re beautiful in all the ways that matter.”
At its best, I believe love is about safety: someone you can be your truest self with and still be pushed gently toward your best self.
The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other.
― Slavoj Žižek
Words are futile devices
How am I supposed to just get over it when every part of me swears it misses something it never even had? Words can only get me so far. They are such fragile tools to carry something so vast. I wish I could cut out my heart and show you its arrhythmic beat the moment I get in your proximity.
But as long as the other person doesn’t want to see it, see me, there’s nothing I can do. It doesn’t matter how I see the world if she values say appearances and I don’t pass. I could fill entire oceans with sonnets in her name, and all she would feel is pity, maybe even guilt. And the last thing I want is for my love to be your inconvenience.
This is the futility: the heart burns with innocence, but the words falter. And still, we speak them because silence feels heavier.
According to Žižek, answering why you love someone is not the cause of the love, but rather a result of it. Making the words meaningless by themselves.
Blessed be the mystery of love
Well, all the things I talked about earlier don’t actually matter. Sorry for making you read so much of what might sound like philosophy, like I was pretending to be some messiah of love. The truth is, love at last is still beyond me. I carry my small journal on love everywhere I go, jotting down notes whenever I think I’ve finally figured it out. But when I actually do fall in love, most of those theories fall apart.
Take the girl I’m in love with now. This love defies all logic, and it wouldn’t tick a single box in any book ever written about love. I don’t even know much about her. Like, isn’t knowing someone well supposed to be the most important part? I’d like to get to know her. I even showed up at her door with a bouquet of roses, but no one answered. Real love perseveres, I tell myself, though I wish it didn’t; bouquets are expensive, and I can’t keep eating dinners on her curb forever. One day she might spot me, and then what?
At least I like to believe it’s love. Maybe it’s one of those other fancy words: ‘infatuation’, ‘limerence’, ‘obsession’. Maybe I’m just romanticising a doomed love arc.
Well, it’s five in the morning now, and I’ve written far too much. Perhaps love isn’t something to figure out but simply to feel. So make mistakes. Fall in love. Fall out of it. Yearn, cry, crave, blush, scream. Just never give up on love, because I truly believe it is worth it. That even if my heart were shattered into pieces, it would still have been worth it, for the risk of love is loss; the reward is everything.
Lovin’ can hurt sometimes
But it’s the only thing that I know
~Ed Sheeran, Photograph
For more such half-drunken rambling, look out for my upcoming articles on Her Campus at MUJ.
