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What is Love All About?
I don’t often think about love because I don’t understand it. I heard more stories about heartbreak and pain than stories about love and happy endings. This hardened my imagination. I didn’t even think about wanting to fall in love one day. I thought all that exists is reality and reality is weird and complex. Humans are even weirder, including the human in me; I don’t understand my own self sometimes.
I discovered that I agree with Alain de Botton, a British philosopher who encourages us to have a realistic view of love and warns against romanticizing it like in the literature and movies. He says: “Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity.” Alain thinks that we search in others what we lack in ourselves, and we expect our other halves to magically “complete” us. That’s why we always end up disappointed.
Although I always thought of myself as a realist when it comes to love, I always secretly wished to find that other half who can help me understand my own weirdness. I wished to find someone who completes me; someone who’s internally calm and eternally wise; someone I can learn from; someone I can trust and confide in; someone I can tell anything without the fear of being misunderstood. That…
