UNWRITTEN

(Disclaimer: the topic of this reflection is romantic love. There are so many more types of love and our language cannot yet reflect all of its facets and depths. Here i am discussing romantic love, not friendships or other meaningful encounters of souls.)

The universe has given me the chance to be happily in love. It handed me the right person – or one of the right people – on a silver platter, for me to grow and enjoy life with. Love has stared at me right in the face long ago, yet i chose uncertainty, chaos, suffering, for years before i could look back into its too intense eyes.

Why?

Well, there’s a plethora of reasons, and everything is always so much more complex than we like to believe. One of the most interesting and pervasive, however, is art in its broader sense – elevated or pop, alternative or mainstream, spanning through quite a few centuries, all Western art i grew up immersed in has been and i fear still is utterly unable to portray a happy love. It is incapable or unwilling to find beauty and complexity and nuance and, well, art, in peace, serenity, and warmth.

For reasons that would probably deserve a whole series of essays, artists have decided that art can only come from suffering, from struggle. And there is undoubtedly some truth in this. Friction and conflict is what makes stories interesting, and there is so much learning and beauty in pain. But why is the poetry of the everyday, of the mundane, of the contentment, always so unappealing and bland?

All traditionally happy love stories end when the lovers accept their fate, their destiny, give up their resistance and finally surrender to each other. And even when we get the most beautiful and serene depiction of this, we are precluded what happens next. We don’t know how this ending, which is in fact another beginning, will evolve into something new. We are not allowed to fantasise about a calm, balanced, happy love. No interesting and inspiring representation of mature, long lasting, loving relationships (of any kind) is given to us, and therefore we naturally end up internalising the idea that all the fun and excitement is, well, in the drama.

This is not to be blamed exclusively on the artists who revealed themselves to be uninspired by this calmer version of love, though. I think this is a multi-generational vicious circle, in which the lack of beauty in the representation of happy love inhibited regular people, and likely artists themselves, to experiment genuinely with it. We accepted that what comes after the happily ever after is a monotonous, dull, repetitive life which, at best, gives us the happiness of building a family and reproducing ourselves. No more nuance, no more complexity, no more growth, no more unpredictability and excitement and fun. When in reality, of course, long and committed relationships are full of conflicts and friction that can and often do lead to growth and fulfilment and beauty. But this happens much less frequently than it should, too often turning into an evolution of love that seems subdued and unappealing.

Why on earth cannot we romanticise other forms of love than that of the Sturm und Drang? Why don’t we find maturity inspirational and thrilling? Why have we accepted that passion and fun end with youth?

So i simply think all my life i was terrified of my youth to be over, and with it, to have to say goodbye to the thrill of newness, exploration, experimentation, joyous discovery. I was terrified of facing adulthood, a new life chapter which promised nothing but boredom, responsibility, dullness. I wanted to be young and fun and a little crazy forever, i still want this.

Thanks to an incessant stream of songs novels poems films about the only kind of love our Western society seems to worship, in God’s stead as someone said (find quote!), i internalised the stupid lie that if i “settle” in love, i become old and boring. My so well crafted persona, for which i worked so hard and so long – a woman who is free and untamed (what a fucked up word) in love at least, while every other aspect of her life has slowly but surely given up to the capitalist world order that sucks our real life out of us in order to grow fatter and more powerful.

And i think that this is the real trap: we are fed this idea of love so that we can focus on that instead of waking the fuck up and overthrowing this horrifying exploitative society. Destructive and toxic love stories in exchange for our souls. Let us feel alive in this sterile and doomed form of love so we can forget about how insanely dead we feel every day on our way to and from work, how anxious we feel in every waking moment we don’t spend glued to our screens for the daily iv-drip of serotonine that keeps us docile and gives us the illusion of retaining enough sanity to keep on going.

But romantic love is just a piece of the gorgeous puzzle that all of us are. And once love, real love, has fallen into place, we have to pull up our sleeves and keep on working hard to try and complete as much of the puzzle as we can. Because we only get one.

All my life i felt like i all i could focus on was the maddening search for that single piece. A few years ago, i found it in a man who saw me as no man had ever seen me. But the thought that this crazed, intoxicating search could be finally over, froze me. I averted my eyes, threw the piece under the carpet, and kept on searching. At times, the joy of this search was so burning and intense that i almost made myself believe that it was the whole of the puzzle. My life revolves around love, and this is all i can do, everything i can be. I am love.

Now that i find myself on the threshold of maturity, summoning up the courage to finally jump into the turbulent, foaming, dark waters below, trying to unlearn all the toxic brainwashing we all are subjected to – i have to resist the urge to look back at my reflection and find her so attractive that i choose to fall back yet again into her arms.

I love him like i have never loved anyone before, i feel for him something that feels so true and right that touches me to the core. And yet, i still doubt. I still hesitate. My muscles contracted, i shake uncontrollably, paralysed, while my soul commands them to leap into the void. It feels like self-preservation but i know it’s just a lifelong conditioning.

A chapter is ending, a door is finally closing, no more half commitments, no more masks. Let’s give this a try, sincerely, wholeheartedly.

If i make it to the other side, if the foundation of our love holds us, if, standing fiercely upon it transfigured and reborn, i grow into the new mysterious self who is smiling gently at me from under the scary waters – i will make it my mission, one of my missions, to create beautiful art about this love we don’t like to talk about.

May it spare some this silly pain and lay a brick on the path towards a new, kinder world.

May it be a note of the music to which the future generation will dance on the ashes of capitalism and all the pain it caused us.