When I think about love, I think of it in this order,
1. Infatuation: eyes meeting from across the room, heart pounding, palms gliding over the surface of your pants to dry the sweat that had built up
2. Taking a chance: drawing up the courage to ask someone out, the shyness of one or both participants, the light blushing of ‘Yes, I’d love to go out’
3. Heartache: the reality that there are things that can tear us apart and the idea that there needs to be a climax of some sort
4. Happily Ever After: this is optional after heartache, but what if there’s a reunion of love, what’s next?
I once had a conversation with my mother regarding my personal relationships. I asked her why every guy I had shown the slightest interest in was never emotionally available. She had hit me with, “Well, maybe the reason why you’re attracting those kinds of guys is because you are emotionally unavailable.”
Though it took me a few minutes to register her smart yet blunt response, I realized that perhaps she was right. So, I made it my mission to become ‘emotionally available.’ I spent months working on myself, looked for ways to become comfortable with being vulnerable, and listed the qualities that annoyed me about potential partners because I read that those area reflection of my own shadow attributes.
I went back out there and gave it a shot. The outcome? Love is boring.
What was I doing wrong? Was I meeting the wrong kind of men? Were my expectations too high? The people around me were starting their lives with the ones they loved, and I was not even remotely infatuated with anyone.
I am not a romance movie kind of girl. I find it cringy and annoying—from a conscious level, it probably has to do with my discomfort with being vulnerable. I much prefer sci-fi or fantasy movies like, The Adjustment Beaurue, I Origins, or In Time. However, even within that genre, love was complicated. The world somehow depended on the unity and compatibility of the main characters that were to be in love. How can we live up to that standard in our extremely mundane lives? Even as the characters save the world and kiss happily ever after. What next? They open a joint bank account and start paying their mortgage and taxes?
This idealized notion of love has been at the forefront of why a lot of relationships do not work. How do we know that this particular person is the one we’re supposed to give a chance? How do we choose one person and stick with them for the rest of our lives? Most importantly, how do we deal with plain mundane love?
What about you? How do you cope with the reality of love? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below and don’t forget to come back for our next blog, Is Mundane Love “IT”?
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