It seems all young people want to find true love. We want to meet our soulmate, someone we will spend the rest of our lives with. Our idea of love is meeting someone and aligning with the person so much that it is impossible to detach ourselves. But there is no such thing as true love. We fall in love with what we see. We fall in love with beauty, wealth, behaviour, and other traits of an individual. Because we are dynamic and can change with the click of a finger, such feelings can die off at any moment. I’ll use a short story to try to make a point.
Bright is a handsome young man. He is tall, with chocolate skin and a soothing voice. The day Helen met him, she fell in love with him immediately. It was like he cast a spell on her. He was all she ever wanted in a man. They exchanged numbers and days later, it seemed they’d known each other forever. Helen loved being around Bright. She loved the scent of his perfume, and the feel of his skin next to hers. His skin was supple like that of a child. His thick voice gave his personality a mixed blend, making him amusingly both soft and strong.
Why did Helen fall in love with Bright?
The answer is simple: Helen did not fall in love with Bright; she fell in love with his personality and things about him. If things were different, and Bright had a high-pitched voice and wasn’t tall, Helen wouldn’t like him. There is no such thing as loving a person. You love things about that person. And if it turns out that those things aren’t there, the story would be entirely different.
Before Bright met Helen, he had a crush on a girl named Sandra. She was beautiful, had a round butt, and a good-looking face. He suspected she liked him too but he never asked her out because he deemed her too smart. She had her glasses constantly on her nose and rationed her words, as though it had cost her a fortune to acquire the sentences stuffed in her mouth. She made him feel inferior. She would use words he didn’t understand. Once while they had a conversation, he told her ‘you are beautiful’ and she replied ‘beauty is relative’. He had no idea what that meant so he cracked a smile across his left cheek. Helen was better for him, he thought. She was simpler, and didn’t talk about serious issues of life like gender equality or sexism.
Why didn’t Bright ask Sandra out?
He found her attractive, but the attraction did not last because he didn’t see the qualities he expected in her. He already had a preconceived idea of the sort of woman he wanted for himself. We usually already know what we want. And that sets the tone for whom we find ourselves with. It is therefore not a natural occurrence, love. It’s a deliberate search for someone that suits you. There’s no such person. A person can tolerate and adapt, yes. But you fell in love thinking you were just right for each other, which was a lie. The preconceived qualities you’re looking for maybe there today and disappear tomorrow.
Helen did not like Bright, he wasn’t as sophisticated as she liked her men to be. The man she loved was called Nelson, a psychiatric doctor. But there was a problem with Nelson. He didn’t know how to treat a lady. He called her sweet names sparingly. He rarely bought her gifts even though she knew he could afford to. He worked all the time, she rarely saw him. When they started dating, he was nicer. Now, he was just bland, like sugar-free bread.
Een though Helen loved Bright, the relationship lost it’s spark at some point. Neither of them could tell what triggered their disconnection. They fell apart so gradually and naturally that it seemed they had planned it was going to be that way. Helen met Nelson, a mysterious doctor. She loved the mystery behind him, and the adrenaline rush she got sleeping in his matrimonial bed.
Sandra knew Nelson was cheating, but she wasn’t going to leave him. She hated the idea of jumping from one man to the other. So she stuck with him. She would pay Bright a visit once in a while. Even though he wasn’t sophisticated in life, he knew his way around her waist.
Summary of the Reasons why there is no such thing as love:
- It depends on how the other person feels. If a person you once thought you loved no longer loves you, your love is meaningless.
- Feelings are fueled by the things that we see and expect.
- Feelings are transient, they can change over time.
What we think is true love might be a mere attraction, the pull by the characteristics and appearance of a person we admire.
