Love

Romance makes me feel a bit sick. Ever since my first boyfriend in Year 4 demonstrated his affection for me by giving me one of those plastic eggs with gloop and an alien inside, I've been a bit weird about public displays of affection. Don't get me wrong, I liked the gloopy alien very much, I just didn't like the niggling feeling of embarrassment and guilt that plagued me afterwards, as I sat there pondering the meaning of love while squeezing alien gloop between my little 8-year-old fists.

I still feel much the same now. It feels like romance is a performance - a series of actions and symbols that we all act out because we think we should. Giving flowers, candlelight, hearts, the colour red.

During my late teens and early 20s I was single - sometimes out of choice, sometimes not. But during that time, I became very happy with my independence, and very cynical about love. I read a book recently that really resonated with me and that period of my life. It's called 'Essays in Love' by Alain de Botton. In it he dissects the process of 'falling in love'. It's a brutally honest account of love and I like it because it covers the things we don't like to admit to ourselves or each other. The doubts, fears and illusions. The pain of losing something, the confusion of feeling something for someone that you once felt for someone else, the boredom of domesticity. 

The rose-tinted gloss of Valentine's Day hides all of these things, but this is the truth of love. And it's so much more complex than anything we're drip-fed by Hollywood - so much more enjoyable. It's not cynical to acknowledge the dark side of love. In a way it makes it easier to be with someone and forge a relationship that runs deeper than a few gestures or happy memories.

I can't really do the book justice by writing about it, so here are a few passages to give you a taste:

“We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?”  

“It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.”

“.. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.”    

  “The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.”