I have a broken heart, like it doesn’t work properly kind of broken

Love comes in all shapes and sizes. Love is blind. Love conquers all things. We all talk about love like we can recognize it every time we see it. But do we really? What is love anyway? Do we really know what it is in the first place? They say there are different kinds of love. The Greeks had different names for it like philia, agape, storge, or eros. Love with different meanings. When I say love, I don’t mean parental love because those are pretty obvious. Some parents don’t know how to show their love to their kids or maybe they are just shitty parents, but it is very easy to determine whether that love is real. Friendship love can be tricky but it is a lot simpler. It’s easier your friend is true or is simply a backstabbing two-faced liar. Either way, we can still easily determine whether that kind of love is true at face value. The truly complicated love is always the romantic one. Between one lover to the other. I’m not going to be some homophobe saying that this kind of love is only limited to male and female relationships. It could be to anyone as long as they are in love in the romantic way we as a society identify romantic love to be.

I used to see love differently. Being raised a Christian, I saw love with a God-loving lens. Of how love can be unconditional and limitless. Of how it can help us surpass any obstacle that we have. That is what the movies tell us. We have been taught that love knows no bounds and that if we have it, nothing is impossible. So a young boy like me set out early to have a happy life and one of the priorities in my checklist was to find the one as soon as possible. Why did I think that it should be as soon as possible? Well, there was one possibility that if there was that one perfect person for me in the world, I had to move as early as I can, knowing its a possibility that some other guy might get her first. Another reason I thought was that maybe I am destined to have a high school sweetheart and that if I don’t move while I’m young, I would miss all those experiences I had with her. Thus, for reasons of not wanting to miss out, I tried to at least be open to finding the one even in high school. I had tons of candidates for the position of being the one. I would have a crush on a girl, talk to her, text her, call her, hang out with her, and date her. Through the process, I would start creating a version of her in my mind that isn’t truly her and I always create an ideal and perfect version of the girl and see myself ending up with her for the rest of my life. And that if I ended up with her, everything would be perfect right? Wrong. of course. Inevitably, of course, I find out that no one ever fulfills those impossible ideals that I have and no one ever will because I’ve just been wrong the whole time. I expected every girl to be that perfect person for me because I was told that if I ever meet the one, I would love them unconditionally and that it was the kind of love that always lasts no matter what. The streams of constant disappointment led me to realize that it wasn’t the girls that were the problem. It was me. I had it all wrong. Love isn’t inherently unconditional. Love isn’t this real force in the world. We need to realize that we are love and it is simply what we make it. It can be temporary or permanent, short or long-term, sweet or bitter, with one partner or more, it’s just this beautiful monster that devours us completely and we can’t stop ourselves from being in love.

What I do know is that love is something that originally came out of our sexual desires for reproduction as a species. If we didn’t have to have sex to reproduce, we as a human race wouldn’t have romcoms, ballads, love stories, or any sort of romantic love. But we as a species find it necessary to have certain special attachments to a partner in order to reproduce, so we just had to make that love as romantic as we can think of it. We can look into it from a more practical perspective. Humans reproduce in a span of 9 months and usually, it had to follow more offspring which means multiple consecutive 9 months of pregnancy for women. And that meant, that if both the man and the women were invested in the survival of their offspring, they had to stick together and at best be compatible with each other. At a minimum, there has to be some level of attraction on both sides where they would decide to stay together and not abandon one another. It started to be more practical for some societies to promote monogamous relationships, but polygamous marriages were also allowed as long as the family can be provided for. With the partners having commitments for one another, it is inevitable for them to have struggled together thus making their relations more sentimental than others. Sentiment, sexual attraction, and an ensemble of social norms about how love should be romanticized in folklore and stories, marriage started to become sacred and dramatic. It was good that humans took it seriously. But these days, the world has changed. Our practical needs are a lot different than how they were back then. And love is changing the same way we have been changing as a civilization. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is and we can either dwell in the past or be who we are right now.

How I view love now is a lot different since my change in worldview. So what is Eros? What is romantic love? I’d say it’s something that can be real to us. It’s an idea that we can commit to. Like how we decide to stick with this one person that we have feelings for. I’d say there is really no such thing as unconditional love. The love we get and give is human love. It can fail us, betray us, hurt us, break us, kill us, steal us, disable us, and do everything that we thought love can’t do to us and I say this because love is us. Love are us human beings trying our best to be that one person our lover can live to love. Humans will always be imperfect and that’s okay. When we accept that all of us can and will make mistakes, things would get easier for us. Like forgiving each other or giving leeway for failures and mistakes. Basically, the whole point of all that I’m spouting here is that we need to change our view of love. We should stop looking for a perfect, unconditional, unfailing, and sacred love. Love isn’t God. Love is us. Love is human and it’s trying its best. And that’s all that we can ask for.