Love Stinks
C May 15, 2005

I'm pleased to announce that after five years of struggling, I have finally come up with a working definition of the word "love." I'm sure you're all thrilled to hear what I have to say.

Love (noun): A condition wherein the presence of a particular face or voice inspires the brain to secrete a highly addictive chemical that encourages dependence. What begins as a euphoric feeling soon becomes necessary merely to function, and can cause severe withdrawal when removed.

Whereas the best relationships unarguably come when two people inspire the same reaction in each other, I might be inclined to suggest that the healthiest relationships are those with television personalities you will never actually meet. Not only does this inspire the minimum amount of addictive chemical, but will always be available when needed as there is virtually no chance of losing contact with your favorite celebrity.

Furthermore, Tennyson was full of crap when he said:

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

I feel it, when I sorrow most;

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

When love is lost, as opposed to some combination of other emotions that fool you into calling it love, the withdrawals can become so horrible as to create twice as much pain for every instance of pleasure. While this statement is impossible to argue for those who have not "loved and lost," those who have are almost unanimous that they would rather not have wasted those two and a half months anyway.

So this is where I'm at.


Addendum:
The previous several paragraphs were written in September of 2004, a great many months ago, following an especially bad break up. I feel I owe you some explanation that although the relationship was not long, it attached itself to some remarkably high expectations that, at the same time, seemed completely realistic. The heartless snatching away of all my future plans inspired me, for a period of weeks, to want to die.

As of this writing, I have had time to view this relationship from a distance and to delve deep into my own psyche. I have grown, I have learned, I have evolved, I have had numerous anonymous sexual partners, and I feel it is my place to assure you of one thing: I have not changed my opinion in the slightest.

In fact, if my mind can be said to have changed at all, it is only to understand that loves stinks even worse than ever it has stunk before, and I fully believe that the more mature and wiser a person becomes, the more repulsed they will become by the sickening stench of that word we call “love.”

What follows is yet another dollop of my generously bestowed wisdom on “love” and how much it stinks.

All the lonely people among us, I am sure, are similar in their revulsion of the famous phrase “love will come just when you stop looking for it.” We shake our heads and laugh, thinking that the phrase makes absolutely no sense. I want love now. I don’t want it later, I don’t want to look for so long that I get frustrated with the whole deal. And just how is love supposed to find me if I don’t seek it out?

We dismiss it as the petty sympathy it usually is, issued by men and women alike who have found a love they are totally satisfied, and would like to lord their aristocratic new status over you because you are still single. To put it simply, you continue looking.

Gradually, as you look, you begin to understand more about life, the most important part of which is that you understand more about yourself. You will discover the difference between love and sex, which are really much less similar than people give them credit for, and maybe you will decide which one you really wanted all along. You will, hopefully at some point, start thinking of exactly what you are looking for, and maybe you will draw up a list of the ideal qualities you want in a mate. This will lead you to ask yourself why you want someone in your life right now, and this is good because it will then cause you to look at the roadrunner you have been chasing for so long and wonder what you will do with it once you actually catch it.

At that point, you will probably catch your first glimpse of the truth. There is no capital “L” Love out there waiting for you to catch it, there are just people; and who needs people? By this time you will have laid out your ambitions, and you will have in your mind at least some rough answer to the question “where will I be ten years from now?” And, on the off chance you don’t find someone to love, you will probably have some loose form of a plan for what you intend on doing with your life.

Yes, you will realize, there is a much better purpose for living than Love, and that is the acquisition of money. Why, I now ask, would you want to base your entire life around one individual, completely throwing off the rest of your plans? Get married, and you no longer make decisions about yourself, you have to think in terms of “we.” You lose your distinctiveness and become half of a pair, and what’s more, you can’t be spontaneous anymore, and you can’t flirt.

(If your goal was simply to get laid anytime you feel like it, I can name any number of nightclubs and bars where this is an easy possibility. Which, I might add, is more than a married couple will experience, as well.)

So you are happy. You have finally reached a point in your life where you are accepting of yourself and your intentions, a kind of peaceful state where the last thing you need or want is to factor some random unknown into the equation.

At that is when the “love will come when you stop looking for it” phrase rears its ugly head yet again, this time from the opposite side of the line. You had completely forgotten about it, and if you had any occasion to think about it you assumed that issues of love and togetherness were no longer your problem. But it is a problem, because either right away, or give it a year or two, and someone will fall into your lap that worms their way into your life while your defenses are down. Maybe you will meet them at work or on vacation, and maybe you will be instantly attracted, or you’ll think of them as another one night stand, or maybe you have no real feelings about them at all. Nevertheless, it will happen.

Now you find yourself in the singularly awkward position of fighting as hard as you can not to fall in love, swimming upstream against the pull of the waterfall, as it were. This is a situation that can be impossible to describe to a single person who has not yet reached their peaceful acceptance, and it’s something that you yourself would not have understood so many months ago.

And if it happens that you lose the fight, and you decide that perhaps it is worth it to change all your plans and base your future around this one person, that this is the Love you were looking for all along and it just took this long to find it, then maybe you have a shot at happily ever after, and good luck with it.

For many fortunate individuals, this is the end of the story.

Now I delve into my story, which may or may not apply to everyone.

Months pass. You begin talking about marriage. You begin to believe, as you had never truly accepted before, that this could happen, and that you want it to happen. You decide what had before been unthinkable, that this person might be worth settling down for, throwing away all your plans with your job and not having sex with different people.

And then something happens to make it all go horribly wrong. A month or a year later, after wedding plans had officially started or well before then. But however it happens, you have invested so much of yourself in this relationship that it feels as though it has already happened; ergo, in your mind, your marriage has fallen apart.

For months you languish. Could something have happened differently? Could your Love, maybe, somehow, still come back to you? The answer is no, though you kid yourself that maybe you will get an unexpected phone call, but the phone never rings.

For the first week you entertain thoughts of suicide, because it seems as though all your goals are no longer possible, that you have suddenly been consigned to an eternity alone. For the rest of that first month you try to make yourself feel better with varied success, but you can’t stop thinking about what you’ve lost and you can’t stop thinking how lonely it is now, and how much you wish you could just talk with them again.

Months go by. Maybe you realize that you are no different that you were before, maybe you don’t. At any rate, it is a very long time before you can reach that peaceful acceptance again, however you pray.

And I am still crawling…

So this is where I’m at.

I won’t go so far as to say that I’m so scarred by life that I’m incapable of love. There’s something cowardly about that, and I’ve seen enough to know that it’s never true. No matter how stoic a person pretends to be and how cool they want you to think they are, the possibility is always open that they could fall in love again. And so it is with me.

Instead, what I say is that I simply don’t think love is worth anything anymore. Yes, I can fall in love, suddenly and deeply, and often times when I don’t even mean to. You experience all the shades, from unrequited, to passionate, to secret rendezvous, and maybe one of them will get to meet your parents.

But however many times I fall in love, it can’t change the fact that I’ve been jaded by it. It’ll happen, and it’ll be over in a couple months, and then I can go back to being the same guy I was. Love doesn’t close the distance between two people, it doesn’t make someone notice you, or want you any more. It is not an acceptable substitute for trust, respect, attraction or any number of important qualities that are essential to a good relationship. In summary, love don’t mean a thing.

Love stinks.

Thanks, Julie.