Let me Count the Ways… in which we un-love and are un-loveable
“A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure” — or so it would appear. And hence it goes for Love, the ill that knows no cure.
It is not that we aren’t thinking enough about Love. Quite the contrary, in fact. We are perpetually analyzing, contemplating the idea of Love as a didactic study, and not surrendering to the idea of Love in its entirety, along with the confounding matrix of emotions it represents…
So we appear to be living through some extended winter of discontent. And no, it is not the millennials, nor climate change nor Quantum Mechanics that is to be blamed this time around. Let’s just go ahead and rule out Brexit and Trump too, while we are at it, as well as the bad left knee that makes tarmac-running so damn irksome. It is us, comprehensively and undeniably, us.
So here’s calling out the elephant in the room…
We are incapable of receiving love — even as we like ace-ing the “giving love” challenge — we lay so many conditions, pre-conditions that very cleverly safeguard us from the threat of receiving love. Maybe it is a subliminal sense of ‘what have I done to deserve this?” Or “what does this obligate me to?” And if (or more optimistically, ‘when’) we are ready to receive love, we want it on our terms. Just so. With a little shaving of generosity and kindness, lightly dusted with a strange fearful respect for boundaries and individuality, and possibly even a hint of punishment — for isn’t that what our early tough-love parenting childhood taught us? That Love was never to be given freely, but earned.
Our individuality is our pride. Also our distancing driver. — We want to be loved just enough, not more. Lest our carefully put together idea of ourselves unbalance itself. We have strong boundaries and often we believe that someone’s decision to fall in love with us (if it can indeed be called a ‘decision’ in the first place), should receive some pre-consent from us. I have actually caught myself thinking on occasion “How dare he fall in love with me? What sign might I have given inadvertently for this to have happened?” “Do i not have an opinion on this?” And then growing belligerent towards the bearer of affection, unwarranted.
We ascribe to the idea of love when it comes upon us announced, a sort of false praise and adulation. Like, when someone (should they dare) say that they love us, our first reaction be like “Ohhkaay, now hold it right there — no, you don’t. You don’t even know me well enough to like me, let alone love me.” Never mind that it is entirely possible to love someone and never grow to like them! This then is the instant cause of irritation and annoyance, when we ‘read’ dishonesty in someone’s interest in us, never once stopping to think that the very notion of love is an abstract one, one they likely cannot explain themselves even in the most sober state — and least when the endorphins are raging like a bull on steroids, inside of them.
Is the act of Loving the business of foolish men and women? — Then there is the idea that admitting to loving someone without having spent the time really getting to know them is basically a ‘weakness’ , a sign of desperation, or character flaw. So we brave a strong front. After all, everyone loves a strong and happy person, don’t they? And yet therein lies the inherent cognitive dissonance. If love is a ‘weakness’ and ‘strength’ is what we prefer to portray, how do we admit to loving or being loved? So we laugh it off, appear callous, sarcastic and go on being alpha-(fe)males in our ready dismissal of love
As if all this were not enough, we then start tallying up “Likes” and try to figure if the math adds up — We have completely discounted the notion of falling in love as some primal instinctual inclination. Rather, we adopt a principally left-brain approach to a right-brain dilemma… do we like the same books or cinema, is his/her IQ and EQ in the acceptable territory, will he or she be good at saving money or earning reasonably well; which of my life goals would lift off if he (or she) were around in my life, versus me forging ahead through life on my own steam (and having to keep myself motivated through it all) and so on and so forth…
Little wonder then, that we are all still so delusional and disillusioned about the idea of love, whilst silently wishing for it to land like a little singing bluebird on our window-sill on a random Tuesday morning.
Little wonder then that we had to build physical bone-tissue-muscle-sinew rib ‘cages’ to contain the wild spirit-animal that Love is…
