boners+heartbreak.

the image of love

If I were to ask you to close your eyes and picture the word love, you might revisit a particular childhood memory of watching morning cartoons with your mother as you eat breakfast together on the sofa. You watch as the cat chases the mouse, and she watches you: her progeny. In the warmth of her smile, something you took for granted at the time, you notice that the crows feet on the corners of her eyes have crept deeper into her skin over the years and the greys of her hair accumulated. This is her - the first woman, possibly the first person you’ve ever fallen in love with. The innocence of it, the unnamed feeling that you didn’t even bother to inspect. Juxtaposed to the realities of now - how cocked full of weight that memory has after everything you’ve witnessed since.

Possibly, the next thing you think of is the dog you had at the age of 14, and how long you held his head on your lap as it passed from this life to the next, how you ran your fingers through their coat for the last time. This time you remember the tears that rolled down your cheeks and the dry-heaving that comes along with tears. Furthermore, how the memory of wet cheeks and heavy breathing used to mean your companion’s excited breath and drool on your face. But in front of you is only the husk of a stranger, not the family member you grew accustomed to and became intimate with. This is your first experience with losing a loved one.

the dissection of love

These two forms of love seem to come so naturally for most of us with no preconceived notions - we know how to approach our parents in ways that would trigger a positive reaction, know what games our pets love to play. This may be a byproduct of us being so young when we learned these motions, making them seem natural, or that it’s difficult to love wrong towards these specific objects of affection, but why is romantic love the exception? Why does it more often than not, come so awkwardly at first - why do we trip over our words and our feet when approaching someone we deem desirable...? Why was the most horrific memory of middle school my attempt to buy a girl chocolate and flowers, only to eat the chocolate and run away with the tiny bouquet I crushed in my pockets? In hind-sight that was hilarious but it definitely wasn’t funny before.

From before the age we are taught to read, we are already exposed to a flurry of movies, music, and books that show us this deeper sense of connection. Our favorite kid’s movies are full of them - Disney being a popular example, having an expansive library full of stories where princes save princesses from their harrowing clutches. This only develops even more as we grow up. We hear about the “effortless” love that is portrayed by Romeo and Juliet, only to later be revealed to us in our high-school English classes that they caused the death of 6 people. Countless stories depict a love that comes easily with problems easily resolved, and its other facets unexplored - i.e time and how it affects relationships. In movies and books, we often only see the early stages of love, showing us its highest of highest but often never its lowest and what comes after. Expectations are often unrealistic and Romance is often romanticized. How differently would we love if we weren’t already so saturated with its idea? How often would we fumble and fall?

Without high expectations set by the big screen, perhaps it would become easier to show our love with less fear, having no prepossessed idea of a “picture perfect romance.” There would be no right way to approach a girl, no wrong time to begin planning for a future shared. Maybe we would love more purely. But... it is also a possibility that we get lost without a proper guide in our romantic endeavors; perhaps these old practices have remained mostly the same due to their effectiveness. To show how this might be a legitimate scenario, I propose looking at how people in the 21st century have only recently began to enforce and advertise the idea of mental stability. We do not see this same sense of importance in introspection in the past like we do today. People were shunned into institutions and deemed as unfit, unimportant, and unworthy of society if mental issues arose. Perhaps we just have to pick and choose what works for ourselves and disregard what doesn’t.

But what do you think? How would a world without preconceived ideas of love look like?