Tough love

This one was written about two years ago for a print magazine.

Normally I start off my columns with an introduction in bold, but I’ve been staring at my screen for quite some time now and could only come up with tired old cliches and I’m not gonna beat you over the head with those. Instead, I decided that today’s subject needs no introduction. This is about the most spoken language in the world, after-

Shit, that’s a cliche.

Anyway, in the run up to this year’s Valentine’s Day I am here to offer you my perspective on love and I’ll be honest here: I’m not a big fan. At least not of the ‘developing feelings for people’ variety. Recently I’ve been coming around to it a bit more but the majority of my adult life has been spent believing that love is a mildly to moderately serious mental affliction.

I mean, think about it: your brain literally tricks you into ignoring anything bad about the person you suddenly desire, for starters. Furthermore you start to behave differently, your appetite changes, your hormones get messed up and you get these mild anxiety attacks from time to time. Sounds familiar? That’s because these are also symptoms of depression. I know that love and depression aren’t in the same ballpark (or even in the same solar system, for that matter) but still, when you read it like that you gotta admit it doesn’t sound too palatable.

So why does our brain put us through these weird emotions and physical sensations? For some higher purpose of enlightenment, maybe? To stimulate us to find the one person who completes us as a human being?

Of course not, what are you, twelve? No, it’s because our brain wants us to fuck. That’s why, when your friends are all telling you that Sam is kind of a self-centered maniac, you don’t listen to them. You don’t see it that way. No, ‘Sam is different,’ you say.

Sam is not different though. You think Sam is different but that’s because your brain is basically putting its fingers in its ears and going ‘la la la I can’t hear you’. All because it wants you to have sex with Sam and it wants the two of you to make children together, the more the better. That’s all. That’s the biological purpose of life; to have you spawn as many little brats as biologically possible.

Now I don’t want to push someone into an existential crisis here (at least not right now) so I’ll freely admit that I’m looking at this a bit too rationally. Yes, our lives may be utterly pointless and when we die there’ll be a point in time where someone utters our name for the very last time, after which everything we did and were will be completely erased from this world, but that’s not the point of this op-ed.

I mean, the point of love (in the poetic and spiritual sense of the word) is to find joy in the little things, right? The way she smiles at you when you make a silly inside joke only you guys understand. The way he holds your hand when you’re walking down the park. The sweet little touch of him scrubbing your vomit out of the kitchen sink after you’ve had one too many tequila shots during girl’s night out.

These kinds of things can really make our miserable lives worth living.

And you know, I get that. I admit that I haven’t been to that point too often but when you’re there it’s (probably) lovely to know that you’ve got someone who loves you for who you are. Someone who appreciates what you do for them and has learned to live with your faults. But you have to get there first and that seems like it’s the hard part nowadays.

You see, that initial feeling of overwhelming love, where you feel like you’ve met the perfect person and everything in the world makes sense now that they’ve entered your personal little universe, that’ll go away. That’s still your brain, producing all sorts of hormones and doing science shit in order to maximize the odds of you both having wild and unprotected sex.

After a while your brain calls it a day though and you slowly start to take off your rose tinted glasses. And as you’re coming down from your hormone high you’ll start to see that maybe, just maybe, your friends could’ve been right about Sam being a bit of a self-centered person. Maybe you have been cleaning up puke in the middle of the night a bit too often for it to be considered normal. Maybe the other person isn’t so perfect in every way at all. A whole new, rather unfamiliar feeling comes over you. A feeling not unlike the one you experience when you get smacked in the face after talking a little too much drunken trash at the bar. You come to a point where you see things a bit more clearly and realistically.

That point, that’s the point where the real relationship begins.

That point is also where a lot of people call it quits. ‘The spark is gone,’ ‘I just see him differently now,’ ‘she’s changed since we first met,’ ‘fuck cleaning up puke man, I’m sick of it.’ Well, guess what, that’s all part of the deal. Minus the puke thing, I guess.

That first part, the falling head over heels in love part, that’s temporary. The ‘spark’ is always going to go away. It might come back at one point, but it will go away. At least for a while. It’s hard, because before that you felt like you were in a movie. As if you were the best and greatest and cutest couple in the world.

But you’re not a fucking Disney princess, you’re in the real world here. Besides, if Disney movies went on for a couple of years after the prince and princess got together you’d see a whole different side of the story. You’d see Cinderella bitching at the Prince because he didn’t clean the goddamn stables. You’d see the Prince riding off to the nearest tavern because Snow White is hanging out with those annoying dwarves again and they always come by unannounced.

The point here is: a relationship is something that you actively have to work on and it seems like a lot of people nowadays just don’t seem to understand that. Your relationship isn’t doomed because you’re not doing new and exciting things every day or because you’re not shagging like wild animals every two hours. You don’t have to ‘have that spark’ all the time, it’s not physically possible.

You have to build a connection with your partner, a bond. Something that goes beyond the animalistic feelings of the first few months. ‘Love,’ in the poetic sense of the word, is precisely that, for me. It’s sticking by each other, through the good times and the bad.

You know those pictures and videos of cute old couples you’re all polluting my Facebook feed with? That’s what love is. They’ve been through it all together: deaths of loved ones, dull periods in the relationship, attraction to other people, … and they stuck by each other. They worked things out. They didn’t bail on each other at the first sign of the chemical cocktail in their brains fizzling out.

Of course people change and obviously most relationships will not last a lifetime and I’m not at all saying you should stay in a relationship where you’re truly uncomfortable or something like that. You are your own boss, after all. All I’m saying is that, in this day and age of worldwide instant communication and a desire for instant gratification, it might be worth remembering that Rome wasn’t built in one day. A good relationship isn’t built in one day either. Hell, you might even accidentally fuck up the wiring somewhere and cause an entire part of your metaphorical relationship city (this metaphor is going way too far) to go without electricity for weeks, but that’s okay. If the Romans bailed on Rome when the first aqueduct or whatever collapsed one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen would have not existed. Who knows what your relationship can become. But at least, for the love of God, fucking try.