The Romantic Ideal

Messages along these lines are broadcast by the media everywhere. They are in magazines, in radio songs, on TV shows, books and every form of advertising. No matter where you go, LOVE will always be the highlighted content. Love is the stalker that we seek. It is everything, and everything is nothing without it. Or so we think.

We also have very specific imaginations – or illusions, rather – about how it all works. You’re lonely, maybe even a nothing, a loser, until you find “the love of your life”, which, naturally, changes everything. The ugly duckling turns into a magnificent white swan, Cinderella becomes a princess, and – this being the most important part – they live “happily ever after”. Of course they do! Because, as we all know, love is the ultimate solution to all our problems. Or is it?

Let’s think about this subject once again; love. What is it, really?

First of all, let’s consider the different types of love; there’s the general family kind; motherly love, fatherly love, sisterly love, etc, etc. And then there’s the other thing. The coveted thing. The thing everybody seems to react to with a sigh, like we can’t get our rose-colored glasses on fast enough: LOVE.

What we often fail to notice, though, is that love isn’t at all what we wish it to be. It doesn’t strike us like lightning and it definitely isn’t going to make our problems go away; it’s something that grows over the years and has to be nourished with lots of care, effort, and hard work, every single day, for as long as we want to have it around, because it’s not going to keep itself alive.

Yet we expect it to; we think that when we are IN LOVE that it must be LOVE. But those are two different things. Being in love is a fairly short-lived reaction to keep the reproduction process going. For most people, this feeling will last for about two years tops until it begins to fade. Because so many people think that it was “true love” – the thing that is supposed to always simply be there and fight their battles for them – are disappointed and think they were wrong about their partner, especially if they start to want other things or get restless because their problems are reappearing, now that the glasses are coming off.

The other misleading expectation we build up is the one of being the most important thing of our partner’s life. In most cases, we will never be, so we’re setting ourselves up to fail from the very beginning. And if someone actually does put someone else above himself, he’s likely to smother the other person or get very depressed because he’s valuing himself less than someone else, or both of the above. In any case, he will give up his self-efficiency and become totally and completely dependent on his partner.

Many couples who are like this end up secluded from the outside world and therefore even lonelier because they cling to each other to such an extent that they lose sight of other things that are just as important.

The society we live in today keeps feeding us wrong ideals which we cannot possibly achieve, and due to our perfectionism and high expectations, all we do is fail. Learn how to make yourself happy – because if you can’t do that for yourself, how can you for anybody else? So don’t wait for the knight in shining armor; get back on the horse yourself!