On Relationships

Foreword

I am writing this paper to express my views on the nature of love, sex, relationships, and suffering as an asset of loving. Being a teenager, I am aware that my desire for loving or being loved by someone else, not including my family will develop into seeking a lifetime partner.

As biological desires determine humans to love so that they can reproduce for life not to end, not including natural disasters which would eventually terminate it, I could see love as a central aspect that gives meaning to our lives.

In the following parts of the essay, I would also like to address why love cannot be temporary for it to exist in its true form, and why the majority of times, more pain is inflicted upon the individuals when chasing one of the greatest pleasures known.

After I had the chance to have long conversations with girls whom I highly enjoyed talking to, it got me thinking about why this matters so much in life while not being loved could determine an almost constant state of anxiety that could lead to depression if one goal is to be happy.

I want to thank everyone who got through the end of my work since it is the first major one, written just before turning eighteen and published on my birthday as a memory related to my first encounters about thinking of having a partner.

The Circular love

Without love, we would feel lost because we do not belong to anybody. It requires a sense of caring for it to exist, although it has other manifestations that assemble a picture of beauty.

The pleasure that we derive from admiring, connecting, respecting the other is related to love. Still, it makes it challenging to resemble all of these qualities into one person, as many have different attributes, and love could be fleeting.

As this desire for caring for the opposite sex develops at a relatively young age, love has other meanings than the one that our parents gave us. It is the stage that we discover a new part of us that was unknown until we had contact with the person and which made it clear that we are a mirror to them since we understand and build empathy towards the other. This mirror, at first, is spotless; we fall in love with it because it shines only the good side of things.

That is when you like the other so much because, through the mirror, you see yourself. It is as though you have never seen such a clear picture of yourself, but as time goes by, you realize that you were blind. It is not the exact mirror anymore, it got a little dirty, and that is when you know that the other is not the perfect picture you had in your head.

It is usual for this to happen because there is this sense of greatness that we all want to strive for. If it was not beautiful, how would we think that it had any chances of being a picture of ourselves?

Even if it contains dirt, it resembles who you are, and that is what you truly love

This applies only to oneself because you cannot replace your identity. But the other could be substituted for the hope that it remains something ideal. Through sex, you maintain this illusion of idealness. Therefore it is harder to seek something else when you are almost convinced that this image is what you wanted.

What if this fantasy goes away entirely after many years, and you end up not being happy anymore. That could happen even when you are sure that this is my “soulmate”.

I think that love exists in its proper form only when it maintains a decent level of satisfaction for a lifetime. But as young people often want something else, love cannot exist. What we want to make for life, somehow it does not work anymore, and our desires change. They change because we get bored with what we have and still hope that we can attain something better.

For all the effort and the pleasure that love could serve, overnight, all of it is forgotten by one and by the other not. It just fled to the other to compensate for the dirt that it contained. The initial position is reached when we think that this is the one when in fact, we are blind again.

What can we do in this circular position? Who is to blame for our preferences or the complaints that we kept in us until we have found a new “love”. It all comes to the denial of the self. Instead of accepting that this is who I represent, we tend to change for the gain of the one and the loss of the other.

The Paradox of Choice

The denial of ourselves also has roots in how we fall in love. We do not choose who to love, neither when, it happens naturally as we again think of the one and only. This is when suffering is at its highest form. There is the fear of losing the only as we trick ourselves unconsciously as though there would not be anyone who could replace the loss.

As the initial blind proposed that this has to be the one, the after blind consists in the denial of the acceptance of replacement. The only option remains to go with the flow as we have no control over when we would become blind.

What remains to love, in turn, is what it is, a state of flow, not knowing where it will guide you, a tiny dancing insect hopping on the grass, exploring the world around itself, and when it gets boring, it just disappears and reappears when it has found something new. If it stays there for a lifetime, that means it truly liked the place.