In today’s society, everyone is familiar with love. We see it on TV shows, hear about it in songs, read about it, and lucky ones might even experience it. We all grow up wanting to be married and found our perfect match. Some of us even see every person from the other sex as a potential lover.
I found this obsession with love kind of fascinating and scary. How come we desperately want and need a relationship? A lot of questions are floating in my mind, such as: Why can’t friendship be enough? Why are shaping and defining the vision we make of our selves based on the relationships we had?
I went around and asked friends at university what they thought of “Love” with a few specific questions. (I am going to put them here; you can comment your answers if you want to)
- How important is love in your life?
- Do you think movies/media shaped your idea of love?
- When was your first relationship? Was the relationship close to your expectations?
- Did you portray love a certain way before experiencing it?
- If you would be to end up alone (meaning with no lover) however you’d have a great surrounding, will that affect you?
- If you were to have a relationship soon, how would like things to go? Would you change something?
I think these questions can help to wrap your hand around what you think of love and from there you can see things more clearly. Strangely, while asking these questions, people didn’t laugh at me and took the Q&A session very seriously. I never thought that this could be such a serious topic, and I was surprised at how invested people were in the matter. For some reason, I have always thought of love as a ‘girly’ thing, kind of a shame (thanks to our beloved society). I happily learned that I was completely mistaken.
As you may already know, people did not have the same answers. However, regarding the first question, they all agreed on “very important”. We are not all the same, but strange enough we all value love as an important deal. I always asked myself why is love so important, why do we need it in order to feel great about ourselves? At one point in my life, I thought that to finally feel at peace with myself, I needed a relationship, therefore I sought one. When I couldn’t have one I felt worse than shit. What was wrong with me? It took me a few years to learn that “To be able to ‘healthily’ love someone, you need to love yourself first”. That really made me take a turn in my life where loving myself was more important than loving a potential ‘someone’.
I’m not a psychologist or anything, but my point of view would be that first of all, we have been too brainwashed by movies and media, and second of all we’d feel way too lonely without someone by our side to brighten our days.
Even though at first sight my article seems to be anti-love, the questions I asked and a little introspection made me come to a conclusion.
Love is a beautiful thing. Love doesn’t only convey relationships; it also refers to friendships and family. That kind of love is just as important. That is too often forgotten.
When speaking of love, people had sparkles in their eyes and hope filling their hearts. It made me want to experience that feeling that would eventually bring sparkles to my eyes even though we all know that love is not all pink. But that’s also how life is; there are ups and downs. However, we shouldn’t focus only on the downs, something’s awaiting us out there, we just have to be patient and welcoming, and that works with everything in life, everything comes at the right time when it has to.
