Hey guys, Culture here.
The day of St. Valentine himself, also known to some as Valentine's Day, has just passed.
Isn't it crazy?
Who else gets a whole day named after them?
There's St. Valentine, Columbus, even the Queen only gets it because it's her birthday.
Speaking of only getting it because it's your birthday, that's something Valentine's
Day is great for.
I don't want to be crass but I'm talking about the horizontal mambo, making the beast
with two backs, the serpent in the Chinese finger trap.
You know, sex.
Now I don't want to alarm you but people do have sex on Valentine's day.
And you can't demonetise us for this YouTube because sex is the word we're supposed to
use.
You also can't censor me for calling it bouncy up-and-down fun time.
But I don't want to talk about doin' the dirty today, I'd prefer to talk about the
other major component of Valentine's Day: Love.
Don't believe those people who tell you that Valentine's Day can be all about learning
to love and appreciate yourself.
If you go out in the streets and start loving yourself, you'll most likely be arrested
for public indecency.
So I say either get a date or stay inside and eat that chicken you left defrosting in
the sink by yourself you filthy, pathetic animal.
Like you'd really have to be a bottom-of-the-barrel loser not to have a date.
Okay all jokes aside, it's fine not to have a date.
Just ignore Valentine's Day, it's all over pretty quickly anyway.
Speaking of things that are over pretty quickly… oh wait, no, I went through that already.
In any case it's been a few days since Valentine's Day so it's too late to lament your loneliness
now… or is it?
Let's accept facts: We all need love.
I don't care how edgy and/or emo you are, you still need love.
And more than needing love, you want love.
That's right, no amount of listening to The Cure and My Chemical Romance can hide
the fact that you "love" love.
But why do we "love" love?
Well I think it's pretty obvious: Because love is lovely.
Ummm… maybe I should expand on that… what I mean is love makes us feel good.
It's warm, it's comforting, it's satisfying, it's reassuring… it's everything good
in life all at once.
So you'd think that there's no possible way that I could write a rant about love,
right?
Wrong.
Anyone who thinks that has obviously never tried to find love.
And I don't mean love from a parent or a sibling or a pet, I mean from another person
who isn't obligated to love you.
A life partner, someone who makes you get that special ooey-gooey feeling inside…
oh jeez, I feel sick just talking about it.
But how do you find this person?
There's no guide to this, and it's far beyond my scope of inquiry, knowledge or experience
to provide such a guide.
So rather than pretend I can provide a comprehensive list of what makes two people love each other,
I'll just chuck out some ideas for you all to mull over and ultimately fail to provide
any meaningful or useful insight.
Yayyyyy loooooove…
Let's get down to the brass tacks of finding someone you love: Meeting someone.
Every marriage started with a meeting of two people in one way or another, whether that's
in a high school 10 years beforehand or in a casino 10 minutes beforehand.
Not that marriage necessarily means you love the other person, or that if you aren't
married it means you don't love each other or… oh jeez I can see the comments now...
I'm just gonna soldier on.
My point is that to love someone you have to have at least met them!
But wait… some people say they love celebrities, they have crushes on them and they centre
everything they do on them, yet in that case they haven't met them.
But is that really love?
It seems kind of one-sided.
But who am I to say that they don't "really" love that person?
I don't know, but it sounds more like an obsession.
But isn't all love an obsession?
In a way, yeah, kinda… right?
People say things like you're madly in love with them, you fall head over heels, you're
crazy about them… all of these things have a weird impetus to them with an almost extreme
connotation.
I guess you kind of have to be obsessed with someone to love them.
Maybe true love is just a mutual obsession, whether it be correctly founded or completely
misguided, between the two people involved.
So let's use obsession as a working foundation for this discussion of love.
What makes someone obsessed with someone else?
Well an obsession is when something completely takes over your mind, it leaves room for nothing
else and your every thought is about that thing or person.
Once again, another great way to describe love.
But then again, when two people are truly obsessed with each other all the time then
eventually one person gets more obsessed than the other and that person gets tired of the
constant need for attention.
Of course this doesn't usually happen, instead we just… mellow out.
We don't need to hang out with the person we love every second of every day.
But of course we still love them, so now we have "love" without obsession… basically,
we're back to square one.
Maybe this is a language issue.
Maybe love just isn't a good enough word; maybe we use it to describe too many ways
of feeling positively about someone else.
Maybe what we really need are different words for describing the emotions we feel early
on in a relationship versus after being together for a long time.
But no, that's the easy way out, that's what the weak would say.
I want to dissect the "obsession" part of love and figure out what remains even long
into the relationship.
Let's take a step back to achieve this: What actions might one take for someone they
love?
Think of a mother's love for their child.
In this case, considered to be perhaps the strongest type of love, the mother would sacrifice
their own life to save their child's life.
But does this go beyond simply "love"?
Or does this mean that the first time we say "I love you" to our partners that we're
essentially saying "If we were on a plane that was crashing and there was only one parachute
left, I'd want you to have it."
If that's what saying "I love you" is meant to mean then it's kind of uh… daunting.
Like I didn't realise saying "I love you" was that big of a commitment.
That's another good point: Commitment milestones in a relationship.
We have the first kiss, the first bang session, the first "I love you", the engagement
ring, the marriage, the kids… what do each of these signify in terms of our love for
another person?
Of course not all relationships follow that formula, and not always in that order, but
I'm trying to simplify here.
I think commitment is really about trust.
You have to trust someone a certain amount at each of those steps.
Trust them with your body, trust them with your emotions, trust them with your thoughts
and, ultimately, trust them with your future.
In fact, with kids, you trust them with your legacy.
So maybe that's what love is about: Trust, just in differing degrees.
But there are a few issues with this definition.
Firstly, a parent loves their newborn baby but they don't really "trust" them.
I mean come on, they barely trust them to hold a small object without trying to stick
it in their mouth and choking.
That kind of love is more of a hope, a hope for the future.
Instead of trust, it comes back to that obsessive quality: The new child occupies your every
thought; every action you take from now on is done for them, to improve their quality
of life.
But now I feel like I'm verging dangerously close to the apathetic view on love that so
many modern people adopt: A stance based on evolutionary theory.
In case I need to explain, this view holds that love is basically an evolutionary tool
designed to get us to survive and reproduce.
We need to meet a partner, reproduce and then ensure the survival of the baby.
The type of love we feel for our partner evolves over time to suit each of these needs and
the many steps between them.
And of course, this love, this tool, makes us feel good.
In this way one could think of lust as a precursor to love: Both make us feel amazing for different
reasons, yet together they allow us to carry on our species.
I have one huge issue with this theory: It misses the entire point of the question "what
is love?"
The theory explains "why" we have love, but fails to define it.
That is, what is the connecting thread that ties all of these stages of love together?
The commonality between all types of love that is also unique to the experience of love?
The answer: I have no clue.
But I do know this: Love requires you to open yourself up to someone else.
It requires you to make yourself vulnerable, even if it's as simple as risking rejection
when you ask someone out.
It means turning infatuation for someone into a genuine affection and then, finally, into
love.
Do I think that's a complete description of love?
No, not by a long shot.
I'd be a fool to think I could define it in a less-than 10 minute YouTube video when
countless others have dedicated entire works and ballads to describing it.
I like to try and reason things out but perhaps love is best learnt through intuition, experiences
and leaps of faith.
So what I'm saying is, get out there and give it a shot, meet a bunch of new people
and maybe you'll really connect with one of them.
Sorry if you were expecting me to get angry and flustered in this video but I just can't
where love is concerned.
Though that doesn't mean you guys can't get mad about it!
If you have any leaps of faith that ended in falls of faith and finally bone-crushing
and heart-breaking impacts… of faith… that you want to share, then feel free to
vent in the comments section below!
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