Our perception of love is screwed up

Love. What is love? We’ve all heard about it, watched movies about it, heard stories and songs, read books, it seems to be this unbelievably predominant aspect of our culture. People are in love with love, we want love, we desire love, we are starved for love. But the real question is... do we really even know what love is?

Human beings are obsessed with this concept, of finding your person, this human being that somehow just walks into your life understands every aspect of your being and completes you. We love this idea of finding someone who makes us whole, who comes in and fits into our lives like a missing puzzle piece. But the problem with this mind set is that it is completely ignorant of the fact that love, like anything else in our life, needs to be learnt.

The first thing we need to understand is that individual is like their own complex puzzle, when you fall in love, you join two puzzles together to make an even bigger puzzle. However we seem to think, that this other human being (whom we fall in love with) is just going to squeeze their entire puzzle of complexities and depth into this one tiny piece that fits perfectly into ours. This is one of the biggest reasons that people fall in and out of love so easily, because we tend to think that the world revolves around us, and we forget that each person has their own set of experiences that has made them the way that they are today.

The second problem with the way our society views love, is that we believe that love is passive. Instead of loving ourselves and providing love to those around us, we try unbelievably hard to make ourselves as conventionally likeable or ‘lovable’ as possible. We believe that if we make ourselves lovable, people will love us, instead of just giving and receiving love. We try to modify ourselves into whatever society (in that period of time) finds conventionally attractive, into what we think that people we are attracted to will value or like. Now we may not think that we do this, but on a subconscious level, we are all trying to fit into this mould of being ‘lovable’.

Just to make you understand what I’m talking about, here are a few examples of what I mean:

1) Dating apps: On dating apps, people pick and choose parts of themselves that they think that other people will find desirable and lovable. And based on this version of themselves, they want to receive love.

2) Relationship channels: This one takes it a bit further, by making their connection desirable to other people. People on multiple social media platforms will post about their ‘happy’ relationship to persuade people to validate their love, and want that for themselves. They want people to want their love.

3) Love in the media: Love in movies and tv shows, is shown as this feeling that finds you, something that you should just know how to do. They treat love as this cure for our never ending lonliness.

Unfortunately for us, our idea of love is so firmly fixated upon what the media feeds to us, that the extent to which we have dissociated ourselves from reality is so far off, that our standards for love, are solely based on what is fed to us from the media.

Love is a skill, it is an art, and it does not just fall into our lives. If every human being was just spending all of their time making themselves lovable instead of learning how to love,

How can we expect to be loved if we don’t know how to love.

Sarah Makani