Sick of Love

 There's a scene in Sandman's Kindly Ones story where Rose Walker says how much she hates love. She talks about how it robs you of dignity, autonomy, how it takes hostages and makes you vulnerable. It hollows you out and makes you into someone new, because you fall under someone else's influence even if you never wanted to be. It snatches you away from your own life and integrates you into someone else's. Love, in other words, is a parasite.

I wish I hated love just because of that. 

I mean, I get it. The obsession at the start of a relationship where all you can do is think about the person is so frustrating. It's not a peaceful, happy, thing. Rather it makes me anxious and unsettled to have those thoughts, to be continually thinking about the other person. Perhaps that makes me selfish - a recurring theme with my internal monologue - but I don't want to be so focused on someone else I lose myself, and that's what it feels like to me.  That infatuation - that madness - is so uncomfortable, especially when I consider it in hindsight. Losing my head that way feels like robbery and I don't want to feel it ever again. 

The other big reason I hate love though, is that we live in a society that's fetishized it to the point where it feels unescapable. It's absolutely everywhere and it makes me want to scream! Before I go any further, let's be real: we're addicted to romance and that's a very different beast to LOVE. Despite this, everywhere you look someone will be bleating on about how much they wuv their significant other and the cultural mores we live with makes it seem like if you're not in a relationship or at least looking for someone then you're damaged. There's no context to that, and in many ways it leaves no space for breath or healing if you've left a relationship. 

Of course the problem with romance is that its inherently dishonest, but it makes us feel special - the flipside of that infatuation is that hopefully the other person also feels it and is constantly thinking about and reaching out to us. Coupled with stupid ideas about soulmates, or twin flames (blech), we end up in a situation that shuns truth in favour of complicated fantasy. We all want to feel special, and women, in particular, are told that only happens through love and that their main job is to net a man. I presume that's why the wedding day is "her day"? All in all, its hard not to feel like it's an entirely selfish impulse, a "praise me and tell me I'm the centre of your world". I suspect this goes hand in hand with the desire for the big wedding, the dramatic show, and all that stuff. The fact that it has very little to do with actual love doesn't even seem to occur to most people.

(Of course this is hideously rooted in compulsory heterosexuality, ignoring anything other than straight monogamy - but the mainstream is still marooned in Hallmark movie territory and that seems unlikely to change within my lifetime). 

In this sense, we live in a very conservative world, where we must be tucked away in safe units rearing the next generation of workers (and its telling that both religion and economics focus on relationships for that reason, not for wellbeing or pleasure - hell we don't even learn about sex for fun but only for procreation). The message is clear that you're meant to fall in love through the hellish ordeal of infatuation and fixation, get married and then pop out enough kids to feed the machine. 

Our society only focuses on the initial process of falling in love, how many songs deal with staying in love or accepting each others' flaws? Barely any in the mainstream, though there are definitely a few like Nick Cave's Bring It On. I can't think of another, to be honest. For better or worse, we're still stuck in a culture where once the initial stages of dating are over and commitments are made the couple grind along together bickering in what's usually a comedic fashion - because the places we see those relationships are typically comedies. Other than that, society is running after its next fix, the next girl meets boy fantasy where we pull away before reality can impinge. 

Tangentially, I suppose that's why we have marriage, to not just as a way for men to reinforce their hegemony over women but to bind people into predictable units (while ignoring the strife, resentment, and bitterness that exist in those families unless they become a public nuisance because control is the plan, not happiness). 

Dating apps have, of course, made it all worse. That's not even a new thing to say. The media constantly points out how apps have made it less likely to meet the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. Dating is more gamified and transactional than ever before and, if you're like me, most of the time you look at other people's dating ads and feel decidedly unimpressed. The experience of looking at a picture and some text doesn't translate into wanting to meet that person at all, though that may simply be a failure of imagination on my part. That's before you think about the economic side of things, which doesn't drive dating apps to actually want you to make those connections (let's face it, if companies are making money from your search for love, how much do they actually want you to succeed?). In fact, you could argue that it encourages you to keep chasing that high, those bloody butterflies, without ever committing to something with more meat to it.

If we lived in a sane society, we wouldn't talk about romance at all, or treat love as a cure all. Instead, we'd acknowledge that a successful relationship is one with many stages and that it requires many skills and attitudes to survive. The Ancient Greeks defined seven different types of love, and it seems to me that all of them are necessary throughout our lives and especially in our relationships as they grow. So why do we ignore the vast majority of them? We don't talk about the work relationships need in order to survive, let alone prosper let alone equipping people with the proper skills to navigate one. If we did, kids would be learning about active listening and how to talk to a loved one without accusing them of things. We'd talk about the things that make a good partner and how to set realistic expectations. 

At present, for me, I walk alone. Perhaps I'll fall back in love someday but for now, well, I've got a life to live.