Settling for love
And I mean romantic love.
Having concluded two relationships, I’m honestly still wondering if I have ever “loved” before.
Because I feel like I haven’t even touched the tip of the million dollar question: What is “love”? People say there are different kinds of “love” (however arbitrarily categorised). But is there really a distinct sort of “romantic love”, the kind that sits atop a (more than solely socially constructed) pedestal, above parental love, platonic love, or any other sort of love? The kind that is powerful enough to plague our minds and our discourses, to attain semantic dominance over all other kinds, that when we mention “love” it becomes instinct to immediately refer to romantic love?
I’ve more or less come to terms with the fact that one can never fully rationalize or define what love is. At least not universally. I’ve always thought of romantic love as a complex idea. But perhaps it is a simple idea — it cannot be broken down, cannot be explained. Because it exists and that is all that matters — it exists. But existence per se doesn’t necessarily entail that it is innate in human nature and therefore in every single one of us. And even if we all have the innate capacity to love, are we all given the chance to, and do we all eventually come to comprehend what love is? Or are some of us simply condemned to live a life where love is nothing but this elusive, mythical thing?
Sometimes we live on borrowed romance in an attempt to inch towards the feeling of “being in love”. Movies, dramas, books, and whatever the WWW offers. We can try to relate to these depicted romances, imagine ourselves in the shoes of the protagonists, share their tears and laughter. But at the end of it all, when the credits roll, the closing song starts, the last page is flipped, there is this furtive little thought that we are inevitably different. Your story is and will be different. It is plagued with hanging sentences; unarticulated emotions; haphazard thoughts that pay no heed to syntax rules, or semantics for that matter. It’s like a perpetual draft — incomplete, inconsistent, inarticulate, imperfect. But we try everyday to instill some level of consistency, to articulate all the odd goings within, to pretend to embrace all our imperfections, even when we know it’d be to no avail.
And maybe, just maybe, finding The One means finding The One who can complete your hanging sentences, allow your inconsistencies to become rooted and become consistencies, to articulate the fuzzy internal goings, and to, well, in some way or another, make you feel some sense of perfection, even if it were just for a moment.
Our teenage years are a cosy phase that allows us to not think too deeply about lifelong commitments and love, because who needs love when you have friendship? I used to have this naïve notion that friendship alone can give me all the companionship I want for the rest of my life. It wasn’t until university that I realized how frivolous the word “friend” can be to some, and how stubborn I can be at clinging on hopelessly to this idea that everything doesn’t matter — so long as I can be a good friend, even when it isn’t always reciprocated to the same degree.
I’m more than thankful for all my friends who have stuck around despite all my flaws, but thinking that they’d last forever is not only naïve; it borders on being selfish. Reality will dictate that most of them would eventually go on to be immersed in their careers, and/ or families regardless if we do too. Even if we round up unmarried and stuck in the drudgery of a mediocre job we cannot expect our friends to still be sitting in the same boat as we are, offering the kind of companionship that is easy to offer at this unbridled stage of our lives. We cannot expect them to prioritize us just because we can afford to prioritize them. And for this reason I finally see why people spend their lives chasing after the one person to prioritize, and who will prioritize them in return. And that one person has to be more than “just a friend”.
