Nowadays, you can’t watch a movie, listen to a song, read a book or log into a social network without stepping on a big pile of romance. Taking into account that love, or more precisely, the combination of romance and sexuality, is one of the greatest motivating forces for humanity, this is not all that surprising. If it turns out I’m wrong it may just be that I was listening to Louis Armstrong’s version of La vie en rose while I wrote this post, which may have skewed my objectivity.
The ubiquity of romance, whether as the object or subject of the content we consume, has an effect that often goes unrecognized on the way we understand life. At least in my case, it has lead me to believe that romance is an intrinsic component of the human experience. In the mental model of human life that I built, the lack of a romantic component is possible, but atypical.
I now find myself in quite a complicated situation. I’m forced to acknowledge the dissonance between my practice of human life and it’s corresponding theory. Fortunately, as a lover of science, the dissonance between theory and practice is a familiar notion which neither surprises me nor does it cause me any conflict.
You may be asking yourself, dear reader, “Where is it that said dissonance lies?” The answer: my life, extended over two and one third decades, entirely lacks a romantic component. I have never been in love, much less have I participated in a romantic relationship.
I can already hear my friends complain: “Outrageous! The Technical Boy himself assured me he was in love with Jane Doe in our childhood/adolescence!” It’s not that their memories have failed them, I just happened to be wrong.
This is where the thing gets technical.
Love in Context
In a world in which we strive less to communicate with accuracy and precision every day, it is natural for people to use words or concepts with particular definitions to express ideas that can be more general or only tangentially related. This is possible thanks to the homo sapiens’ ability to recognize the context within which a certain expression is used and, in response, adapt their comprehension and their own conception of the language. This way, love isn’t always love, blue isn’t always blue, and cryptographers all around the world have been forced to accept people using “crypto” to refer to cryptocurrency instead of cryptography.
When someone says “I love my new shoes”, we know they don’t mean to communicate the desire and intention to start a romantic relationship, get married to, or procreate with a horrible pair of Fila Disruptor II tennis shoes that seem to be so popular nowadays. We know they mean to say they have terrible taste in footwear. Moving past the more obvious imprecise lexical substitutions, I’d like to explore some words that are more easily and frequently misused.
Love, Infatuation, and Obsession
For most of my life, I genuinely believed I had experienced love in various occasions. I heard the saying “you’ll know you’re in love when you feel it” so many times that, at the first sense of something ever so slightly stronger than mere physical attraction, I assumed it was love. Retrospectively, that “love” I lived, suffered and publicly declared is a great source of shame and embarrassment for me. I can’t recall where I read it, but someone once said something along the lines of “if you don’t think the person you were yesterday was an embarrassing fool, you have stopped growing”. At the moment, I’m happy to report that I’m still growing on a daily basis. The point is that what I have experienced up to this moment in my life has not been love. It has been something else.
If not love, then what?
One of the concepts I have invested the most time and effort to wrap my mind around is the definition of romantic love. Every time I think about it I invariably conclude, as a highly technical, analytical and curious person, that love is a complex series of biochemical processes that happen in the human body (mostly in the brain) and its primary evolutionary purpose is enabling the species’ survival by inciting procreation.
Having said this, what kind of philosopher would be satisfied by such a reductionist definition of love (other than the Reductionists themselves)?
I’ve come to understand “love” as a set of emotions and experiences that simply reinforce the sense of co-dependence and familiarity between two (or more) people. In the romantic context, I propose, the reciprocity in the feeling is instrumental.
In my personal definition of love, a parent may “love” their child without it being mutual, but a person cannot romantically “love” another unilaterally. When the feeling is unilateral, I would classify it as infatuation in the best of cases and, in the worst, as obsession. In other words, infatuation is a reasonable yet intense desire a person has towards developing an amorous relationship with another person. When the intensity of the desire becomes unreasonable, it becomes an obsession.
The reason I believe reciprocity to be indispensible in love is that, to me, love requires an existing relationship to germinate. Relationships don’t start at the stage of love, they start at the stage of infatuation. Once initiated, it’s the very experiences that the relationship facilitates, which themselves reinforce the relationship in question, that cultivate love. As the people involved get to know each other more intimately, go through more important experiences together and acquire familiarity between them, their brains get used to both needing and having the other person. Once the familiarity and co-dependence grows to a degree greater than that of the average platonic relationship, love exists.
Now, who says you can’t develop that sense of familiarity and co-dependence without it being reciprocated? It’s clearly not impossible. If one finds themselves in a prolonged state of infatuation for another person, it is possible that the brain may get used to it and make one feel “in love”. It’s possible that, between innocent fantasies and persistent desire, the brain, convinced of it’s own desire, develops the same internalized feelings of familiarity and co-dependence. This, in my opinion, is what many people refer to when they talk about “obsession”. That’s right. Leaving aside the consequences, origins and details, the only difference between love and obsession is reciprocity.
Some time ago and with the benefit of hindsight, I figured out that all the times I thought I’d been in love I was actually just infatuated. Although these infatuations happened in my childhood and extreme youth, which prevents me from worrying too much about them, I’m ashamed to admit that, under my own definition, some of them could be considered obsessions.
How do I know they were mere infatuations instead of love? What do these infatuations have in common?
There was never a relationship to speak of
First of all, I never “fell in love” with a person that I already had a significant relationship with, neither friendly nor completely platonic. In every case, the person in question simply popped into my life and, not long after, through mere exposition to their existence (100% of the time with great help from their undeniable beauty), I thought myself in love. From that point on we may or may not have been friends, maybe mere acquaintances, and there was never a real relationship to speak of.
In fact, I would venture to say even after the infatuation set in, in each and every case I thought I was in love, the relationships between the women in question and I remained totally platonic and superficial. This didn’t stop me from going to all my friends, my parents and even my sisters, claiming that I was completely and utterly in love with X or Y.
I never really knew them
Although I saw each of these women I “fell in love” with regularly (some daily and some, with luck, once a month), I never gave myself a chance to know them. I had conversations with all of them, but none that I can remember. I’m not exaggerating. If someone had a gun to my head and asked me to recall, under threat of death, subject of any of those conversations, I’d die. What I do know for sure is that my total conversation time with any of these women adds up to less than two hours. I simply made no efforts to get to know them.
Maybe I knew their favorite color. Maybe I dedicated their favorite song to them at some point. Maybe I knew whether they were #TeamEdward or #TeamJacob and then pretended I was on the same team to get them to like me. I never knew what they wanted to do with their lives. I never knew what their most important aspirations, achievements, fears or regrets were. I never gave myself a chance to actually fall in love with them. Much less did I give them a chance to fall in love with me.
I was never corresponded
Since I can remember, I’ve lived under a saying my father taught me and which he reminds me of whenever he senses my hesitation:
The coward does not get the girl.
– The Doc
(It sounds so much better in spanish)
The lesson in the saying is not exactly hard to decipher. It simply reminds us that in order to obtain anything worth having, risking something else is necessary. When I did competitive wakeboarding, it meant that to learn a new trick, win a competition, or just have fun, I had to put my body and, in some way, my life at risk. When I wanted an important position in some academic function, to be admitted to some prestigious school, or a great job or internship, it meant I had to risk being rejected and considered, at least comparatively, insufficient. In every one of these arenas I was consistently capable of taking that saying and motivating myself to action. In every arena I was successful.
Throughout my life I’ve followed the saying in every sense in which it applied. Every sense except one. The literal sense. Women. Even having the saying in mind, I never stopped being the proverbial coward it refers to. In a 23 year-long life, I have never even asked a single woman out for dinner, a movie, or something as simple as a cup of coffee.
What this means is that the only person responsible for my “love” not being reciprocated is me. To be clear, even if I’d dared to ask a woman out and I were to be rejected, they still wouldn’t be to blame for my misery. I simply mean to say that they never even got the chance to voice their opinion on the matter. Who knows? I may have even broken a couple of hearts by maintaining my role as the proverbial coward (worry not, dear reader, even I find that possibility too absurd to believe).
Not being reciprocated meant there was never really a chance of actually falling in love. As I’ve said, love requires reciprocity. Without reciprocation, there was no relationship. Without a relationship, there was no chance of sharing experiences, conversations or intimacy that, as time went by, reinforced in my brain the emotions, sense of familiarity and co-dependence that I call “love”.
My reservations with respect to love
I’m no psychoanalyst. No matter how much time I spend talking to myself in front of the mirror, I wouldn’t be able to say, with any degree of certainty, why I’ve come to be so attached to the role of the coward in the adaptation of my dad’s saying that my life represents. What I can do is offer an introspective take on what goes on in my mind when I think about attempting to start a relationship.
Obviously, the first thing to go through my mind when I consider expressing my interest to a woman, the first obstacle so to speak, is the possibility of rejection. It’s unlikely that this will change in the future. Having acknowledged this, the fear of rejection is, to me, an obstacle of negligible substance. The humiliation from rejection is easy to get over. More than the humiliation from rejection, what I think most people truly fear is what rejection implies.
People in general (me included) are terrified of the idea that once they are rejected after expressing their interest, then they will have done everything in their power (within reason) and still they will not have been successful in starting a romantic relationship with the person they want. Their options will have run out and they’ll have to live the rest of their lives knowing there is absolutely nothing they can do to change the fact that they are not in a relationship with said person. What truly terrifies people is not rejection. What truly terrifies people is futility and impotence.
Once I recognize the impotence that being rejected will cause me, if that is not enough to stop me, I go on to consider what would happen if, for some miraculous reason, I get the “yes”. This is where the real reason I’ve never been in a relationship starts to show.
I consider: What valley of death must one walk through to start a relationship? The answer is always worse than I remember. To start a relationship, people must go through the treacherous process of getting to know each other through what we nowadays call “dating”. Going to the movies, dinner dates, coffee dates, walk-around-the-park dates. What do these dates further imply? What they imply is hours, throughout weeks or even months, in which two (or more) people spend time alone with each other, talking about their interests, things they’ve gone through recently and, after acquiring a certain amount of intimacy, the things that truly preoccupy, fascinate and affect them. This is where they may start to know each other, start a relationship and, gradually, fall in love.
People who have actually gone through this process may disagree with my interpretation. The point is that this all sounds to me like a load of “red tape” and, boy, does red tape give me anxiety. Ideally, I’d like to completely avoid the introductory phase and go straight to the “official” relationship. Regrettably, I find no better way to get to know someone deeply enough to obtain the confidence necessary to enter into a committed relationship.
This where the real problem comes in. Commitment, the actual fly in the “romantic relationship” ointment.
It’s been a while since I stopped being ashamed of the fact that physical attraction is a pre-requisite for me to enter into a romantic relationship. I realized this does not make me superficial. To me, there are mountains of things that are more important than looks. While that is true, it does not imply that a lack of physical and aesthetic attraction cannot be an immediate deal-breaker. I firmly believe there is neither reason for us to enter into relationships with people we don’t personally find attractive nor should we apologize for it. If there’s anything I’d like for you, dear reader, to take away from this blog post, it is the following:
Love, whether in the romantic, friendly, fraternal or familiar, is not something you owe anyone. This is true no matter how much you may like them, how much they love you, or how much they have done or sacrificed for you. You owe neither love nor explanations to anyone.
To cite one of my favorite movies, based on Stephen Chbosky’s novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower:
We accept the love we think we deserve.
– Mr. Anderson
Emotion is a component whose presence in love is imperative. If you don’t feel it, you don’t feel it. There is no reason to make a conscious effort to feel “love” for someone just because they claim to feel it for you. This is something I came to understand after years of dying to be “loved back” by someone else. I eventually understood I had no right to expect love from others.
My advice? Accept the love you want, not the one you can nor, as Mr. Anderson wisely noted, the one you think you deserve.
Coming back to my dependence on physical attraction, it turns out I’m afflicted by a particularly frustrating phenomenon. Along with my unreasonably high standards on the physical aspects, I am a man of annoyingly unpredictable, fluctuating taste. Today I lose my breath over who I believe to be the most beautiful woman on earth, tomorrow I can’t find the reason I found her attractive in the first place.
What am I supposed to do if I start a relationship and a week later I stop liking this person? The last thing I want, seriously, is to hurt someone else and cause them any kind of pain or future insecurity. If it were to happen the other way around and someone lost interest in me, I wouldn’t complain at all. I understand the feeling, so it wouldn’t offend me or really hurt me.
Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, and it doesn’t always stay there. Now, to end a relationship over that myself? Never. I think if it comes down to staying in a relationship I don’t want to be in or making someone else feel insufficient after I’ve claimed to be attracted to them, I’ll deal with the former and avoid the latter. If I wanted to get out of a relationship, my only recourse would be self-sabotage.
Commitment doesn’t scare me because getting out of it is impossible. It most definitely is not. What I find scary about it is that commitment can only end when it is broken. This alone is a reason to think twice, thrice, or a million times before starting a relationship.
These and many more are the reasons which, to this day, have prevented me from having (or giving myself) the opportunity to fall in love.
Looking forward
What does the future hold for a cynical man like me for whom it is very difficult to fall in love? Even after everything I’ve said, I hope it’s a lot of love, romance and une vie en rose. Despite my reservations and my cynical exterior, the innocent kid who would make drawings for and dedicate poems and original songs to the girls he liked still lives, to a significant degree, within me. That kid is the part of me that, when trying to fall asleep, remains awake laying next to nothing but the loneliness that follows him through the day.
Sometimes in those moments of deep and painful introspection I think I’d like to change the past. Maybe remove the coward and, in his place, leave a brave kid who’s not afraid of rejection or commitment. Maybe ask that girl out. Even with those hopes and wishes, my introspection always lands me at the same conclusion. I may change in the future, but I’d like to keep my past self the very same coward, exactly as he was. After all, I have him to thank for coming to understand love in a deeper and, in my humble and inexperienced opinion, more correct way. Maybe to get to la vie en rose, I needed to spend my youth sans romance.
Share your thoughts
Lastly, I’d like to leave you with a few questions to reflect upon:
- In retrospect, have you ever been infatuated (or obsessed) with someone and confused it for love?
- Have you ever been with someone just because you felt you owed them your love?
- Can you put into words what love actually means to you? Is it any different to infatuation as I describe it?
- Do you think it’s possible to actually fall in love with someone you don’t find attractive at all?
- Is it possible that developing romantic feelings for someone may, to your eyes, make them attractive?
*Share your answer to these questions or suggest a subject for my next blog post in the comments section below, shoot me a tweet @technicalboy__, or send me an e-mail. Don’t forget to share this post on Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn using the buttons below. If you like my blog, recommend it to your friends!
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