Love Hater

I, as we all do, have a love/hate relationship with the mysterious and involuntarily emotion we describe as love. Like real, intense, romantic love. I have a very limited experience with love, and in each of my own personal instances of it, the love was unrequited (whether by the girl or by me), so take what I say with a grain of salt.

My main problem with love is that, unlike "like" it is completely irrational and mostly unfounded. When you "like" someone, there are generally real, concrete reasons why you do. Maybe the person is smart, or hilarious, or hot, or kind. But occasionally that "like" is escalated involuntarily into "love" by some random, emotional, illogical force that we may never be able to identify or explain. There are women who I think are awesome through and though, but I know I will most likely never fall in love with them. Then there are women who are, in at least a couple cases, not even very admirable people, that I've randomly become obsessed with.

Due to the illogical nature of love, I used to believe that it didn't exist. In my high school and early college days, I was attempting to live my life by the notion that only rational things existed in the world. And I more or less still believe that the universe is logical and can and will be eventually analyzed and figured out, with one important exception: human fucking beings. The human brain works by processing the physical stimuli we receive through our five senses, and then attempting to make sense of all of it. Humans are unique in that our brains are complex enough to be able to successfully process so much complicated information in a useful way. By this point, however, we've shoved so much random bullshit into our brains: technology, movies, books, television, songs, etc, and so much random hormone-level-altering bullshit into our bodies, that the human brain doesn't know what to do with all the nonsense we're being fed. As a result, the human race has become an emotionally driven, walking paradox of illogical logic. And this is what allows us, among other things, to experience an emotion like love.

Or at least, that's my theory.

So, for the longest, I didn't believe in love. I wrote it off as simple infatuation by people who watched too many Matthew Mcconaughey movies. I compared it to teen girls crying over the Backstreet Boys (at the time; a modern day example, I suppose, would be Justin Beiber).

As I grew older, and experienced new relationships, the love thing kept coming up. I had girls tell me they were in love with me. Obviously, I maintained that love was made up, but in the back of my mind, I wondered. What makes a person believe that they are in love? I asked around. I had it described to me in many different ways. Some made it sound amazing: "It's like when you find your soulmate, the person with whom you fully trust and connect with!" Some made it sound creepy: "It's when you meet a person that you literally can not be without. You can't stop thinking or talking about the person!" And some people were ambivalent: "It's simultaneously the best and worst feelings you will ever feel!" At any rate, I had never experienced any of the descriptions given to me, so they did nothing to change my view.

Later, I was in a weird relationship with a girl who to date I consider to be in the top three of the most awesome females I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. But, I didn't love her. And I was very aware of this. I wanted to love her. But it just didn't happen. I liked her a whole lot. But it wasn't some, like, intense feeling. It wasn't like some ultimate satisfaction.. I liked her, for real concrete reasons, just like I liked pizza, for real concrete reasons. This made me start to think that perhaps I was incapable of being in love. It made sense. I prided myself in being a very rational person, and perhaps being love required a bit of illogical insanity, something that I forcefully and consciously attempted to avoid. Ultimately I was fine with just "liking" her, but (even though she never explicitly said it) I suspect that she wasn't.

Then one day, it happened. By this time I'd grown up a bit and matured a bit, and been dumped a bit, and learned a lot of life lessons, so sometimes I wonder if its impossible to be in love until you reach a certain level of maturity. But, long story short, I developed an intense affection for a girl unlike anything I've ever felt before. It was a person I had no business being in love with (and I won't get into why), and it was completely not mutual. It was complete bullshit really. You acknowledge but subsequently overlook the person's faults. You think the person is gorgeous even right after they wake up in the morning. You basically make a fool out of yourself for an extended period of time. Being the analytical person that I am, I tried to rationalize my feelings, and figure out what they were. But you can't do that shit.

I've heard people say that you never really fall "out of love" with someone. Unless, they like kill your mother or something. You just learn to get over it after a while. And its only been a couple years, but it seems to be true. Admittedly, it's easier to not think about it when you very rarely see or talk to the person.

Looking back, I've learned a couple of interesting things. Firstly, its possible to platonically love someone, like them, and being physically/sexually attracted to them, but not be in love with them. A while ago, I was toying with the idea that what people called being in love was just a combination of platonic "love" and physical attraction. Not so.

Secondly, and this is kind of off-topic, and also pretty obvious once you think about it, but there are more than two types of love. Most people differentiate between platonic love, and romantic love, but there is also a type of love that I call "obligated love", which is usually the kind of love people have for their family members and long time friends. It's basically when you've spent so much time around a person that you naturally begin to care for them regardless of how much you actually like or admire them.

Thirdly, there are degrees of being in love. I've never had a feeling as intense as the one described above, but I believe that I have been in love at least one subsequent time in my life. But it felt much different and was less intense. I couldn't begin to explain why.

Lastly, as I mentioned I have very little experience with love, but in my experience, the common phrase "It's better to have loved and lost, then to have never loved at all" doesn't not apply in any way shape or form.

All in all, my experiences with love have been interesting and more or less unpleasant. While it's kind of cool to have that much affection and adoration for a person, the completely irrational and involuntary nature of it does not sit well with me at all.