How Can We Love Better?
It seems that every phase of our life comes with its own set of truths particular to the needs of that age. In one way or another, we’ve gone through our fair share of loving and being loved. For some of us, the experience was enough of an emotional buffer that we can almost recognise the red flags in the early stages. We know it will amount to something if we actually put in the effort, but we also know something is a little off. Instead of cultivating our crushes into a reality that we can be a part of for a long time, we let them discreetly wither away. We tell ourselves that we’re brilliant, beautiful and would, without doubt, fall in love again, with someone more deserving of us and this would pass, that we’d be happy again. One day leads to the other, and we gradually dismiss the silly afflictions of youth like love and sorrow.
Maybe we’ve hit an age where we truly forgotten what it is like to be in love.
Perhaps we are tired of our pathology, drained by all the energy it takes to fall deliriously in love and potentially curl up on the bathroom floor with our knees tugged to our chest. It is a love-hate strain, the kind where you know you’ll get your fingers or ankles broken somewhere along the way, but you still insist in a regular game of basketball. Similar to an addict driven into recovery, we become far too familiar with the endless vacillation between euphoria and agony. Somewhere in between, we start to see things a little clearer, but never clear enough. An unrequited relationship, or an unavailable person?
This is when we start to love in less volatile, precarious ways.
We become aware of the chemical gently ebbing from our brain. We look at young kids who are deep in the summer storms of endorphins and dish out condescending advice to them that love doesn’t last and will never outlast. We tell them that their recurring attraction is merely a phase and with as all phases, it will eventually phase out.
Maybe it is a phase for us too, that we are no longer susceptible to those crippling bouts of infatuation and heartbreak.
No longer are we as fascinated by the wonders of what being a child and teenage bring about, in contrary, we are plagued with unwelcome truths of old age. We only learn in the form of retrospect: we start to master what it means to be a child only when we are almost done being a child. We begin to appreciate the energy that a teenage has only at the point where we start to sell our soul working for an organisation. On hindsight, we’ll be able to finally figure out what life is all about when we’re on our deathbeds. If only we learned earlier, we might have lived and loved a little harder.
Is life just one heartbreak after another?
Have we outgrown the hopeless crushes, doomed affairs and obliterating heartbreaks of our younger years? Are we not capable of hurling ourselves as heedlessly into love as we did back then? What do we truly mean when we say that our fondest world goal is to be left alone? It appears that we are still in love with the idea of love and we’re displaying our last course of insane jealousy and rage. This time, our emotion isn’t targeted at a person, but at love as the abstract concept. In a pitful and operatic way, we’re admitting that the past heartbreaks were real and we’re afraid to go close to it. Like how we love our lovers the way the sun loves the moon, we no longer dare to burn ourselves just to light them up. It feels far too eviscerating. It feels too tragic to be true.
