Senior computer engineering major
Love: It makes the world go ’round; it’s patient and kind; it’s strange; it waits; it is a battlefield; it’s what I got.
It doesn’t take much to notice the love-centeredness in our culture. We see in far too many movies the common cultural narrative, “Love is what really counts,” with the implied subtext “…and nothing else.” Not money, not careers, not hopes and dreams, not independence or individual strength. If anything else matters, it is only inasmuch as it is instrumental to getting to love.
And not just any love! The love needed here is a special, romantic, “true” love — a forever, happily-ever-after love that makes everything else shine perfectly. And while it might be changing, the “love” we idolize is a heterosexual white one, between good-looking 20- or 30-somethings from well-to-do backgrounds, usually shown from their initial meeting until a fitting conclusion — the kiss in the rain or engagement or wedding. They are the stars of jewelry commercials, the couple in the movie’s final scene, the image of love we are taught from a young age to cheer for, the love that justifies everything else in the story.
Real love isn’t like that. Real life isn’t like that. Relationships don’t stop when the end credits roll after the final kiss. Life is about way more than finding a soul mate and spending the rest of your life with him or her.
Not that romantic, sexy love isn’t great; I am a fan. But it is far from the most important thing in life, and it is certainly not the underlying justification for the rest of existence. People can be, and regularly are, successful and happy and unromantic. And unromantic does not necessarily mean alone, although that’s all right, too; friendship and platonic love are regularly more important to people’s lives than sex or dating.
The story you have been told is a lie. Your happiness will not suddenly appear once “the one” stumbles into the life you’ve built — a life that was only missing him or her. Sexual relationships can be rewarding, but they sometimes suck, and they all require an investment of time and emotion that dramatized love never captures.
Of course, most adults are surrounded with enough reality to have a good sense of what is real and what is imagined Hollywood entertainment. We students are learning, experimenting with sex and dating and friendships. But children grow up without the context to understand and balance out the distortion of the relationship dynamics they are surrounded with in movies and other examples. It takes lots of work to build a better understanding of love from the wreckage of the myth, and some people never figure it out.
So if this idea of love is so bad, what do we do about it?
For ourselves, we can try our best to form a vision from scratch, instead of using the fuzzy amalgam of happily-ever-afters from movies as our baseline. Maybe you don’t want romantic love; life can be just as meaningful and worthy without it. Maybe you want two or 10 loves — that can be OK too! We ought to judge life based on our own ideas of what we want from sex and relationships, not the impossible baloney we are fed about “true love” and the pursuant eternal, effortless happiness.
Physics: Now that’s what makes the world go ’round!
Robert Cobb is a senior computer engineering major. He can be reached at rwcobbjr@gmail.com.
