Love and All That Fun Stuff

Love is something where I feel I can be optimistic about yet cynical about. It isn’t to say that I don’t want to “fall in love” but let’s be honest here. “Falling in love” is hard to do. You have to find the right person and more often than not you’ll fall for the wrong person. I feel like a downer when I write about love but I’m skeptical about it. Maybe it’s because I’ve never experienced love in a romantic sense. I’ve felt strong infatuation but never love in the sense where I feel like it’s the end of the world. And truthfully, even infatuation hurts like hell when you’re the only one reciprocating feelings.

This concept of romantic love for some reason is supposed to be this thing you feel you live for. Maybe it is, but I’m cynical, I just feel like as much as we romanticize love it isn’t always going to be that way. I realized that love comes in many shapes and forms. What works for your friends and family won’t necessarily work for you. Thing is we’re all told that if you don’t have a certain brand of love you haven’t lived.

But that also limits us from really experiencing the love that may be right for us.

I have the tendency to compare what love is seeing how the people in my life experience their relationships even though I know everyone is different. While I consider myself a hopeless romantic, I think I’m more of a hopeless romantic in the sense of friendship. But it’s difficult in that situation, I want a natural ease of conversation, someone I can chill with and just enjoy their company. See thing is I believe romantic gestures mean so much more when you’re comfortable with someone and you both reciprocate the feeling.

I wrote a post a while back which touched upon the proximity of love. It was based on the whole Jess/Nick slash CeCe/Schmidt and Ted/Robin conundrum from New Girl and How I Met Your Mother. It was on how sometimes the people we find ourselves spending the most time with are the ones we end up falling for. And the reason I bought these examples up was because personality wise they’re really incompatible but because of how much time they spend with one another they grow to care for each other. While this isn’t the case all the time it does happen. It’s also why I feel the best relationships form out of being friends with someone. You get to see a person with their flaws and all and still want to be around them.

But obviously there has to be a decision for both of them to decide their feelings for one another, otherwise it’s just unrequited love.

All in all, it’s why I think the best relationships come out of friendships because you know how the person is. It isn’t to say dating isn’t necessarily ineffective. However, with something like friendship and attraction in the mix it can lead to something that’s more likely to work. In dating, we all put on these facades of who we are to impress the other person. While when romance grows organically it comes to be something bigger than that (at least how I see it).

Romantic gestures always mean more when you know a person compared to when you don’t.

And romantic gestures don’t have to be grandiose. But everyone has their perspective of what ideal love is. I don’t consider myself to be a romantic person in regards to how people show off on Facebook/social media or the movies. But I do consider myself romantic in that if I’m with someone I genuinely care about. They’ll be the one I’ll fight the world for. And in that regard I am a lover and a fighter because I don’t think I’d give up on love that easily.