Romantic Love Is A Lie
Many of you will disagree with me. That’s ok. Romantic love is a lie. Here’s why:
The development of romantic love depends upon two people’s ability to cultivate enormous amounts of passion for each other. In order to develop passion, there have to be obstacles to being together. Technology has obliterated the obstacles. You can reach anyone instantly.
Romantic love and the cultivation of it require abstinence, longing, desire and an ethereal feeling of oneness. During episodes of romantic love, no one has to do mundane things like cooking dinner (unless it’s an absurdly elaborate display of food, prepared for an object of desire. A Chinese man once made me such a dinner and even though I understand the rapture of doing over-the-top things for a muse, I was a bit revolted by his effusive offerings.).
Romantic Love has become a fast-food operation.
Prepackaged gifts “from the heart” come from Walgreens, Hallmark, Tiffany’s and Hollywood. The “lover” gives nothing of his or her authentic self, but merely purchases a good which is then transferred to the current object of his or her desire. It’s a cold transaction. There’s absolutely no real passion in such a transference. There is the distinct possibility that American adults have lost the self-knowledge required in order to express their authentic feelings of love. Or, perhaps the man or woman was teased earlier in life for expressing something real and now is emotionally repressed. There is also the problem of instant gratification and entitlement. Most people lack self-awareness and have forgotten what the word, humility, means. I say all of this not from some lofty pedestal of perfection. I speak from experience, lots of experience with romantic love, sexual passion, longing, obsessions, fantasies and romantic dreams. Loneliness, however is no longer the problem it was once.
It’s only through the careful analysis of the last six years of celibacy that I’ve come to realize my experience with romantic love was manufactured from a deep desire to believe it existed. I willed it into existence from the depths of my soul. I have a concrete example of this.
I fell in love very hard when I was 18 years old. I fell in love with a painter who was three years older than I. Our relationship was cut short and full of obstacles. I met him in Tokyo when I was a model. He was an artist full of despair, self-loathing, criticism, passion, you know, the stuff that artists are full of. He possessed something I didn’t: self-expression. He was brash, opinionated but also very sensitive.
One time, while we were exploring a Japanese village, we witnessed an old woman throwing down two screaming kittens to the ground. It traumatized my lover and he went away by himself, tears streaming down his face. I reacted with stoicism. He couldn’t talk for a while. Sometimes I felt he was tortured, or at least manufactured being tortured. I was completely overtaken by his emotions. I loved his free expression because I was shut off, shy and really didn’t know who I was. I felt like he was my teacher.
We wrote feverish letters to each other when I went back to the USA and we arranged future plane tickets and trips. His letters to me were like his diary entries. They weren’t overly drippy with love confessions. They were more like his intimate thoughts about the world and what was going on in his mind. Oh, how I loved his curious mind.
Our relationship was based on emotional and intellectual bonds. We never had sex. We kissed and were intimate, but he respected my wishes to not engage in intercourse. I still remember how my heart raced when I walked up to the mailbox and discovered one of his letters. The longings, the memories of Tokyo flooded back and my brain was again filled with the intoxicating trappings of romantic love.
Somewhere in my naive understanding of romantic love, I believed that the Artist’s love for me was true. It wasn’t.
I have evidence. I think I was a dalliance, a muse. I was an eighteen year-old virgin from the Midwest who knew very little of the world. He was jaded, from Los Angeles, in art school and regularly sculpted giant hands gripping giant penises (he showed me his masturbation sculpture later, which shocked the hell out of me.)
In my naive and disillusioned mind, I believed that at some time in the future we would be together. I don’t remember how it came to be that we lost contact. You would think I would have remembered that detail. Actually, it was too painful to think about. I snuffed out my feelings once it became clear that he was no longer interested in me. My feelings about him were too intense for sanity.
I went off to college in Kansas and he stayed in Los Angeles. I looked him up twenty years later on Facebook and I think I may have written to him. He wanted nothing to do with me. This past romantic love wasn’t true. It was completely made up. I think it was a lie I created.
The reality is as far as I can tell: I was his muse for a short time, that is all. He didn’t think of me in the same way I thought of him. I was a dalliance, an oddity since I refused to have sex with anyone.
He liked me, I think, but he didn’t like me the way I liked him. This is a sad memory to revisit. And the harder truth to admit to myself: I’ve never loved anyone again in the way I loved him. I’ve never had sex with anyone I truly loved. But now that I realize he didn’t love me in the way I had imagined in my 18 year-old brain, it’s really horrible. It’s like death and betrayal. It makes me realize I manufactured the entire experience.
This is the reality of romantic love. It’s not real. It doesn’t last. It’s painful because it’s in the process of ending. Always ending. It cannot be captured, realized or made real. It’s not real. It exists in the mind. It’s a phantom. A hallucination. It’s an idea. A painful one.
I recently looked through all his Facebook photos and discovered he was involved with a young student (she looked like she was in her early 20’s, he is at least 47). She was very beautiful. I was horrified. I realized he’s still trapped in the hunt for his next young and beautiful female muse.
It was at that moment that I released all my memories of romantic love with him. The pedestal I once put him on collapsed before my eyes. I could see that he is a sham. In a flash of understanding, I realized my existence did not matter to this man. He is still falling in love with women half his age. This is not an attractive man. This sort of man is gross to me.
Speaking of gross things. Valentine’s Day is coming up.
Don’t get me cut roses. Cut roses die, just like all love interests.
Giving roses to me was always an indicator that a man didn’t know who I was. It’s not that I dislike flowers, but I don’t enjoy them cut, sitting in a vase rotting their way to the trash can. I prefer to enjoy them in the ground, where they belong, where they can be of some use to the honey bees or ants that might need them. Looking at them outside is enough for me. I feel uncomfortable with rotting flowers inside, cut for no good reason. I dread throwing away their shriveled selves. Also, it’s a waste of valuable resources.
If I ever fall in love again, I’d like him to give me a vial of his own blood on Valentine’s Day so we can examine it together under a microscope (after he’s been tested for every single STD known on the planet.) His love for me should hurt. Do not give me cut roses.
You might also like my other story: I Haven’t Had Sex in 6 Years
Stellabelle is the pseudonym for Leah Stephens. She just finished her first non-fiction book, Un-Crap Your Life.
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