Understanding Love?

Only fairly recently, “love” in a romantic way, became the thing that always popped up in my head. There is always a trigger that makes me keep thinking about it. A joke from my friends or just constant quips and questions as to why I remain alone in the midst of the hustle and bustle of this world.

In the middle of a conversation, a friend said, “Your heart is cold.” And I seem too idealistic, they said. But what's the point of life if you don't have value to hold? Or in another moment, the other friend stated that I choose to be single because I'm difficult to approach and too hard to open up with men. Some said I am just not ready yet to be in a relationship. Or something must be wrong within me. A friend once said, that I probably don’t have sexual attraction toward another. I know he’s not that serious, but I just get it seems confusing. Why did people see me just like a rare anomaly girl, only because I have never been in a romantic relationship? 

I let too many asides go around after all this time, and now I’m fed up! Nope, that’s not what I mean to get a boyfriend right now. I do admit, I’m disquieted by this circumstance. It’s hard for me to explain the exact feeling inside me. Love for me is way too complex, not as simple as saying three little words. This is the entity I have learned throughout my life and it is always related to many aspects of my life. Here I want to state: I reject the words that being single is synonymous with “something wrong with me”. Especially for women who get a lot of pressure related to this.

I don't know whether this article will just be my leap of mind. But I’ll start it with words I keep in head: Lose yourself in curiosity, in knowledge, in passion–in feeling it all, in the world, in the stories and lessons it has to teach you. Never lose yourself in love, in another person. You are your own home.

This society already views that relationships may be meant to fulfill our every desire. As though it is the significant other’s job to fulfill ourselves, expecting too much of the other to do us a favor.

Eric Fromm, a social psychologist who wrote The Art of Loving sees modern capitalism as works on love nowadays, he wrote a critique of the effects of capitalism on love. It is called the mutually beneficial exchange. I buy your product and you get my money. This is what he means by “the personality market”. We try to make ourselves as lovable as possible and after that, a standardization of commodities will be formed. We called it ‘equality’. What I mean “we” is the majority of our society.

Just like we are all trying to liven up our market value by complying with what others expect. Why does love pejoratively means a passive thing? People are always focusing on being loved. Here’s why I do believe that our conception of love is cultural. Yes, on the other hand, it makes us selective, we can choose which ‘market’ we’re putting ourselves out into. I have told many friends that I know, they have catalogs. So no wonder, if they break up in a relationship, there’s still another person, they call it ‘crush’ awaiting. 

For me, love is an action, rather than only a feeling. Love is close to our responsibility over something. We are taught that we have no control over our feelings, this is the thing that I think degrades the meaning of love. 

Social media and so many pictures in films or fiction stories are portraying a perfect image of the ‘ideal relationship’, how men treated women or just all sweet things that becoming higher standards of romantic life. As Baudrillard has ever said, we interact more with hyper-reality than reality itself. We have an urge to copy the magical feeling of love in our imaginary love life. 

Whereas love becomes the thing that we can study, but whenever we try to rationalize it, most of us will say that we overanalyzed it, as if it is part of the supernatural. I’m skeptical, is the craving for romance fed to us by social norms and culture?

The social constructionist must argues that romantic love is a product of society and culture, we collectively make of it. The experience of love itself varies culturally. This is not a meaningful rejection of romantic love. But with full awareness, I just want us to think clearly, about which ones we should and shouldn't care about. Sometimes I feel so morose when I see that most of us are confusing ourselves with everyday life, bearing heavy burdens that we have full control over not choosing it.

If talking about human relationships, yes, we need both biology and sociocultural. An anthropologist Helen Fisher whose book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love said we have evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and reproduction: sex drive, feelings of intense romantic love, and feelings of deep attachment. Romantic love has a specific brain system, it is near the very base of our brain that pumps up dopamine. Poetry, movies, fictional stories, romantic song lyrics, and many triggers that depict fantasy romance are part of the basic human drive that comes from the oldest parts of the brain. Maybe for now it is the only genuine plausibility that I noted to make me understand what love really is.

For I agree that romantic love is socially constructed, doesn't mean that it is fictional. It is not always imaginary, but I’m sure, it is feigned. And so we tend to always be fake. Talking about the relationship is talking about the concept that the other individual should stay with you forever, complete you, make you whole, fulfill all of your emotional needs, and solve all your problems. Then dominantly, it became a standard for marriage. I’ve seen lots of cases in real life a woman’s life became dependent on her husband–had no life of her own.

Romance loses its sacredness by not giving space to liberty and our true fulfillment inside our souls.

Finally, Erich Fromm makes a case for an active approach to the art of loving. Love is not something that happens to us passively, it’s a fire we have to feed with all the other aspects of our lives. I highlight the sentence that loving well comes from living well. There are no separate compartments in life, everything is connected. The healthier the connections in your mind, the better you will connect with someone else. He stated that love, is an art, the same as life itself.

I quote what Eric Fromm has ever told: “The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life.”

I do really love my liberty much. I will not pretend to be someone else just to long for anyone. Love is all things I do in life, everything that comes with genuine and pure respect. Whoever will be my life partner in the future, I'm sure he exists and is growing himself well. We don't have to have a romantic relationship like the social fantasy constructed, demanding each other to fill in the void inside. I'm sick of the drama, we just have to be ourselves in each other's footsteps. Dancing together, moving forward over time, living life day by day without losing our own self.