“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it - all idealism is mandaciousness in the face of what is necessary - but love it” [Friedrich Nietzsche]
As I have stated last week, love is a troubling subject to me. It has taken many a nights of pondering this abstract topic for me to even discover my feelings on it, and only after a relationship of about two years have I grasped them in some capacity. One of the greatest findings has been that I actually don’t feel a strong need for romantic love. I would like to bring some nuance to these thoughts of mine.
It was at quite a young age that I heard the word love, as it is with most people. When a grown up would ask me whether I had my eye on any of my classmates (I was about 7, for context) I would answer them that there were some classmates who would be a tier two contender, and that I would then move on to my tier two contenders if none of them loved me and then tier 3 et cetera until no people I knew were left to list. This was usually not the answer adults were expecting to hear, but they found it cute how I had a plan for every possible rejection and/or breakup at that time. When I view this answer in light of the knowledge about myself that I have now, I can see that I did not actually understand the feeling of love. I had seen a lot of love on television or in movies, but this strong feeling of wanting to spend eternity with another being was something alien to me. The 7-year-old me only saw two people being together, kissing (ew, gross!) and living together, and I thought this was just the way things worked.
Although I may have become a wiser man as I grew up, this notion of what love meant was still something that largely stuck with me. In (the Dutch equivalent to) high-school, I saw some of my peers get into relationships, and still thought of it as the act of being together with someone. Even though I could see what “love” was meant to look like, I never had any crushes (and still have never had a crush on anyone) or had any butterfly-like feelings for someone as they would sometimes be described as in literature. I just thought that I hadn’t met the right person yet, and kept telling myself that I should just be more open to love in order to achieve good love in life. I had been struggling with myself during that time, and thought that once I understood myself more, I would also be ready to love others.
Around my late teens, I had noticed that those feelings still did not come to me, and while I had read and noticed that a lot of young men would start craving venereal intimacy, I myself still felt repulsed by (the thought of) such things. Although I noticed that certain things could still arouse me, I found that the arousal came from something more conceptual than corporeal. To illustrate without getting explicit, the idea of desiring lived stronger in me than the actual object of desire. The more I read and learned from other people, the more I started to notice that this was not quite normal, and I largely attributed it to the fact that I was still growing and learning things about myself.
Once I thought myself ready to love others, I decided to start loving someone. I thought that was the way things worked, that you would develop feelings for someone by willing to love someone. I made myself warm to the idea of loving that woman, and started to will it inside of myself, and some two months later, I asked her to be my girlfriend. Most of the “feelings” associated with love followed suit, and I expressed these feelings in the way which I felt these feelings were meant to be expressed. I did not know what love was supposed to feel like, so I just called whatever we had love. This worked, and I was happy with where things went. I did not feel like I was fabricating love, as I simply believed love was the act of loving someone, and the act of choosing to love someone. Through this lens, I really did love her, as much as any belief I hold over myself is truth and as much as all creation in me is real. I feel that this was also why I was able to let go of these feelings in such a short time. I had willed myself to be in love without actually feeling or understanding love, so instead of having to let go of a feeling, I had to let go of an idea. In the sense of idealism, I guess I was romantic after all.
And it is this simple fact that has made me turn to introspection about romantic love. Love is something I feel, and something I understand. Love, to me, is the great yet abstract warm and fuzzy feeling you get whenever you are surrounded by things that bring you joy, comfort and other positive emotions. Romantic love, then, is the ideal of this feeling, the ideal of having an object that both gives and takes love indefinitely and unconditionally. It is the perpetual motion machine of love, a northern star at the horizon that cannot actually be reached. After a while, I found that romantic love is something I could not understand because I could not understand what made it different from the love I felt for myself and the world. In truth, it is nothing different, and it has been an ideal all along. In the most pessimistic view, romance is a social construct designed to keep us wanting and distracted; in the most optimistic view, it is a path that can lead us to intimate togetherness and a construct for curing loneliness in people. But even if this optimistic view is great, it is not something the true Way cannot provide in me, and I am still able make the conscious choice to love everything around me in my own way.
To summarize this thought, I feel that trying to fit the mold of romantic love into my life is something that at best gives me a strong goal in my social relationships (that is still weaker than my own) and that at worst distracts me from my own Ways and keeps me longing for something that is merely an ideal. If the actual feelings were any different, I would look at this differently, but why would I try to ignore my own Way and feelings by forcing into them a concept of romance just because I feel that this is or should be the norm? If romantic love of this kind can be willed into existence, can I not will even more beautiful things of my own creation?
Does this mean that I reject relationships, marriage or any other expressions of romance? Of course not! I am bringing it into question, and am warning myself and others that romance is merely romantic. We must decide on our own what our lives are supposed to look like, but romance need not be a part of this. As Fisher pointed out our Capitalist Realism, I merely turn your attention to … Romance Realism!