Valentine’s day has come and gone this year to find a lot of you beautiful, lovely, pink and red heart shaped couples locked up in the house under Covid19 restrictions and it has been a tough time for many a great couple. Some of us have found this time a welcoming experience where those normal struggles of having to make time for our partners are no longer a valid excuse and have given us the opportunity to spend some well deserved quality time together. Others unfortunately have decided that being stuck in the house with the other half is no longer worth the multiple arguments, the shotgun insults, the constant headache and have out rightly said “bun this” or “sod this”, depending on whether or not you lean towards the Jamaican patois or the English cockney and have packed your bags to take your chances with Corona, for she is less dangerous, than deal another second with the overwhelming partners.
When we get stuck with the same person who probably has only shown us their Sunday best every time you meet up to go on your social date or you wake up next to each other in passing, then get ready to go work, come home, make food, have a little kissy kissy on the sofa, fall asleep together in each others arms watching a favourite tv show, wake up halfway through the night and drag each other to bed is a completely different experience to walking up, crawling out of bed, seeing the ghastly sight of someone who can’t be bothered because their office has been closed for almost a year, doesn’t feeling like doing anything right now because there’s not much to do except surfing on the sofa, mindlessly flicking through Netflix and openly farting every10-15minutes, we start to question if this is what we signed up for because we don’t like what we are experiencing.
But in honesty what’s wrong with this? Why don’t we like this?
We don’t like this because when we go through our courtship dance we tend to always show our very best. All of our amazing attributes, skills and talents to lure the intending partner into our nests. Another major part is that we always hide or cover up all our faults, all our imperfections, all our rotten parts, where there are as many as there are good. We maintain this deceptive charade which is incredibly difficult and tiring for as long as we can. Then during Lockdown when motivation is at an all time low, we are all now comfortable dropping the veil and letting things slip to show all those many issues we horde in our locked cabinets.
So why during Lockdown for the past 11 months haven’t we spent this time together getting closer and falling deeper in love? I think the answer lies somewhere around the idea that it’s because our fundamental concept of Love isn’t what it should be. The idea of Love isn’t what we thought it was. Was it?
First let me start by blaming Walt Disney who, although created our favourite childhood cartoon characters, spoon fed us millennials the famous franchise of this fairy-tale love. Cute struggling princesses, without a care in the world, meets evil villain, falls into calamity and then gets saved by a heroic prince, falls in love, gets married and lives happily ever after. Excuse me while I pause shaking my head. It’s all a load of foolishness isn’t it.. When in life does this Ever, ever, EVER happened. For us millennials we would have been 10x better off growing up with Pixar movies. They show the realness. These movies, which are fantastic, show the realness of what real life relationships are truly about. Love is not a fairy-tale. Love is hard work. It is. We know it is and why is it hard? I think it’s hard for two reasons. The first reason is that we have this incredible egotistical rhetoric where we say “You have to love me the way I am.”
That is the worst sentence I believe of the 21st century. Love me for the way I am? Because it’s made with the ego, which is the false self. The self that says I am perfect or I don’t have to change because what is perfect doesn’t need to improve. If we were truly happy with the way we were. Life would be euphoric. There would be no need to better ourselves, strive for more, change, grow and mature. This mentality avoids those hard conversations when our partner tries to level with us and we roll off with the excuses of I’m busy, I can’t talk right now, we’ve spoken about this before. When we do take the time to hear our critique, not to listen, we reply with the “yeah but, yeah but you or so do you,” deflecting accepting the responsibility of things that we might be better off changing. If our partners, who love and care about us, send us a message in kind, by telling us about something that they are not happy with and I mean a genuine account, not the whining and whinging that some people do (ignore that for that is a sickness of attitude that I will give my 2 pennies worth on at a later date), we don’t need to answer with defensiveness and resentment. Why do we need to battle our partners into the next world war? Taking up the strongest of arms and latest technologies in modern warfare. Arming ourselves with spiteful words and destructive behaviours that push our partners away rather than take the time to actively listen, which is to take in what they are saying, absorb it and reply to it so we can draw them in closer. If we were outside in a lovely garden and suddenly got stabbed with the most oar looking splinter, wouldn’t we run to our partners, extend our hand, grit our teeth and squeeze our eyes shut knowing that our partner would squeeze out that nasty foreign object. We already know that they will cause us pain beforehand but it will help us feel better afterwards.
So why are we quick to eject the splinters in our body but quick to defend those splinters in our attitude? If it was an employer or a social group feeding back to us an honest critique we would readily start to change that which was not accepted. We eagerly do this for wages (money) or for social acceptance but we struggle to change ourselves for love and self improvement.
The second reason, as put forward by British philosopher Alain De Botton is that human beings don’t actually know how to love and/or poorly trained in it. In his interesting YouTube video titled “Why you Will Marry The Wrong Person” which is a simple funny extraction from an essay taken from the philosophy of his School of Life collection he gives us the idea that as human beings we probably get an idea of love from our parents. So if we grew up in a typical nuclear family where both parents are present and we witnessed our dads giving our mum a bunch of flowers every other day. I’m sure it would not be hard pressed to assume that as a man witnessing this as a child you will probably bring your wife or partner flowers and as women, you would probably expect to be given flowers. De Botton gives a better notion of rather than asking “are we in love” because Love is an emotion, we should be asking “do we know how to love?” Because feeling love comes in many shapes and forms as it is an organic emotion which is ever changing, but the act of Loving is a skill and a skill isn’t an instinct which we are inherently born with. A skill is something we have to learn, cultivate and develop and it is a skill which we are all poorly trained in. To go a step further I watched a beautiful Instagram video from the #blacklove search which featured an older black couple that just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. The interviewer who was clearly impressed asked them one simple but hard question. What is your secret for being married for such a long time? The wife answered, of course it was the wife who answered, (cough cough) but her response was epic.
She said “you young people think that love is a feeling but it’s not. Love is a decision. If you think your feelings are going to get you through 10,20,50yrs of marriage you are sadly mistaken.”
KaaaaaaBoooooooom…… she just dropped the “Fat Boy” over our heads. I’m going to wait while we huddle in the dust from the nuclear fall out.
The thing is I’m not saying that we shouldn’t expect someone to fall in love with us. They should but I think we need to understand that people don’t fall in love with you for HOW you are, they fall in love with you for WHO you are. How you are being closely related to what you do and who you are being that deeper thing that dwells down inside. Maybe we can call this our spirit or our soul. That thing which transcends the labels that we often attach ourselves to. How you are is a snippet in time saying this is me right now for we are multi-layered creatures. We are mixed with amazing things and absolutely horrible things. When our partner tries to level with us they are highlighting something in us, at this point and time, that might not be as extreme as absolutely horrible but maybe something that is not so nice and or maybe just even something that could be better. If we were walking down the street with our partners and you had a large chunk of nastiness hanging from your nose which your partner decided to leave and not inform you about, most of us would be extremely annoyed if not livid that our other halves continued to let us look ugly out in public without intervention. So we shouldn’t get defensive when our partners intervene when we are looking ugly in private. Our partners are only saying that they care about what is going on with us and they give us advice so that we can take control and better a certain type of situation but we have to realise that it’s only when we invest time bettering ourselves that we can enjoy an improving situation. It’s better to be proactive about love than reactive. Let me create a feeling rather than wait and be in my feelings. We have to remember that the Relation Ship of love is a vehicle and in order to get from one place to another we need to first set a destination, then plot a course and then set the sail. A ship is something that has to be driven and it takes all hands on deck to manoeuvre. We have to also remember that it’s not just clear smooth sailing to the exotic love island, there are many deep dark waters that we have to traverse which can swallow us up whole. But that’s the beauty of it all. That’s how we get to the nirvana. Offer everything to Obtain everything. That is the rapture and ruin of relationships, but we still have to remember the vehicle we sit in. It’s not a relation kayak or a relation boat. If we wanted to go paddling we should have stayed in more shallow waters.
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