Welcome to my blog!
Here we talk about all things emotions, the overly impressive hold they have on us, and anything else that’s on your mind. Grab a seat and a glass of wine and let’s chat!! 😊 *EXPLETIVES FREQUENT AND WELCOME*
Good evening readers!!!
So I’m going to be honest… I have no idea what I’m doing. Some of my friends in the past have told me that I should try something like this, but to be honest, it’s hard to find a niche that doesn’t already exist. So, here I am, trying to forge my own way into the world of the unknown (in other words, I am flying blind lol).
As such, I’ve been trying to think for the past few days about what a blog from me could look like. I struggled a bit with trying to figure out what a good format could look like, so I’m playing around with some different way to go about this. For the first go around, let’s try to look at this like you’re reading a journal of mine. Only problem is, I’m writing to an audience. Should I tone down the brashness of my unfiltered thoughts? Probably. Will I? F*ck no lol.
So, let’s give this a shot. You’ll probably need liquor. No pun intended. My jokes are terrible.
Finally, September’s coming to a close. I don’t know about you, but that spells good news for me; I’ve been ready for this fall since the end of last fall. My first items on the to-do list? Light a candle that smells like cinnamon, make my mom’s chili recipe, and obsessively analyze and dissect the terrible things that have happened to me in a toxic-ass relationship over the past year-and-a-half that I’ve finally had the courage to get the hell out of.
Sound like anyone else?
Let’s cut to the chase. Love sucks.
Love SUCKS.
It hurts, it makes you angry, and it makes you jealous. It’s this crazy whirlwind of combined emotions that honestly drive you crazy, and I’m SO sick of it. And what’s worse, we’re human; there is zero way on God’s green earth that we’re able to escape our emotions (even though we might think we can through bottles of rosé or Tinder binges or what have you).
Our fate’s been sealed: love is inevitable. Doesn’t that suck?!
Lucky for us, humans seem to be pretty resourceful. Strategies pop up all over the place trying to make love more bearable, or easier to navigate, or easier to feel in general. Most of the time, though, our resources around love only tend up making us want to beat ourselves over the head. You’ll find sh*t like this in all those celebrity magazines or self-proclaimed “guru” books that really only care about the bag. Yes, searching for the answers seems about as useless as a flashlight on a sunny day. On a rare occasion, though, we might find a strategy or a piece of advice we like. In fact, I’ve only found one that’s actually made me want to (at least consider) start believing in love again. And no, it doesn’t come from a book that looks like an Andy Warhol panting barfed all over it and slapped an attractive celebrity model on the cover saying, “You can, too!”
Seriously, grab a drink; I’m about to blow your mind.
Philosophy. Philosophy has an answer for us. Please don’t click out lol. Seriously, don’t worry; I’m not talking about lengthy arguments from philosophers that couldn’t begin to comprehend what it’s like living in the 2022 love scene. The guy I’m talking about is the real deal.
Robert Solomon wrote a handy little book called True to Our Feelings. In it, he dissects the concept of emotions so thoroughly that I couldn’t stop reading. I devoured the book in just a few days, but the one chapter I kept returning to was his take on love.
See, Solomon didn’t think love sucked. In fact, he thought it (wait for it)… beautiful. And enduring.
The f*ck?!?!?!
Curious, I read on. According to Solomon, it seems that love has a lot of power. Obviously. I mean, when’s the last time you thought love was no big deal? It’s been “hypercognized,” in his words: love has so much power because we’re constantly talking about it. Granted, we talk about love all the time. This blog is about love, for crying out loud. We’ve beaten all the perceived bits of love into the ground in an effort to define, describe, and discover what love truly is. What is it? Don’t ask my ex; he seemed to think love was being on Tinder at 3 am while I was asleep.
At first glance, love appears to be subjective. I mean, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” right? People fall in love with different people all the time for different reasons. Solomon sees this idea, but he raises us one. Acknowledging the subjectivity of love actually allows us to get to the root of the objectivity of it. In order to support this claim, Solomon starts at the beginning of the love chain: sexual attraction. Using it as a piece of evidence, he talks about how there are certain aspects of people that seem to be universally attractive. In fact, he says it’s “biological.” As such, could it really be as subjective as we might think?
Love is an emotion. It clearly has some sort of structure to it that goes beyond the mystical sh*t we read about in those self-help books. Solomon goes on to tie the previous notion of sexual attraction in with three anecdotes from a guy we all colloquially know: Plato. Please don’t groan lol. Seriously, the stories in Plato’s Symposium do a pretty good job of summing up some of the hardships (and some of that beauty that Solomon references) that love so graciously bestows upon us.
Essentially, in Plato’s stories, a bunch of guys are sitting around making speeches, and they’re all trying to exemplify different parts of love. Essentially, they’re doing what I’m doing right now with y’all. We’re all trying to make sense of the most elusive emotion in the entire universe. Three characters, though, highlight the pieces of love that I find most intriguing (as well as Solomon). The first guy talks about soulmates. I don’t know what y’all believe about soulmates, but Aristophanes certainly argues for them. Essentially, he tells a story about how humans used to have two heads and four legs, and that they were cut apart by Zeus because of how arrogant they were… hmm. Regardless, they were made to wander the earth for eternity as they searched for their “other half…” hmmm again.
The second guy (Socrates) talks about how people need to see past the “love” of the outside (could this be the sexual attraction from before? Perhaps. I’m sorry, I’m trying to make just as much sense of this as you are) while looking into the person at the true “Beauty” of their inside. If that was done, the lover would see what is called “divine love,” or “Platonic love.” We’ve heard that before. Platonic love, though? Don’t we want the person that we’re gonna be with forever and ever to NOT just feel a sort of Platonic love for us? Sounds sucky to me.
Speaking of sucking, the last guy of the speeches Solomon highlights basically gets really drunk and starts ratting on love, talking about how cruel, trapping, and NOT virtuous love is. I mean, look. Case and point. Right?
Well, Solomon flipped that sh*t on its side and said something at the end of the chapter that stuck with me. He starts his argument with the assertion that love is something that almost strictly has to do with the self. Every piece of any of the parts of love we’ve discussed has something to do with each individual’s internal person. We all go through phases of love, and each one has something different to teach us. For example, love will feel a lot different to the college kid than it will to a 70-year-old couple who just celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary. As such, perhaps it is subjective in that way. However, all those pieces of love still tend to have some sort of internal structure that isn’t as subjective. We all classify those things as love, even if they feel different. In short, our experience might be different, but the internal workings of the emotion have very similar components that can’t be logick-ed away. Yes, I just made up that word, and yes, it is my blog, so I have the ability to do that.
But does love suck?
Solomon doesn’t think so. What’s even funnier is that he STILL doesn’t think so, even after reading and explaining the significance of that one guy’s story where he sh*t on love. I don’t know. But basically, here’s Solomon’s take. Love makes us whole. In an interpretation of the soulmates anecdote from earlier, he explains that love is the emotion that makes us find our own selves through another self. Basically, two identities are searching the globe for the one who will hold a mirror to ourselves, making us see the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of us. “And when all goes well, the resulting emotion is something beautiful and enduring.” We look for the beautiful and enduring, and we endure the not-so-beautiful in hopes of finding that “one.”
So, it seems that love is inevitable, and it’s not all positive (obviously, it sucks). But when the stars align and the conditions are right, by golly, it seems that love can be quite the passion to live for.
With that, I think I’ll end here. I don’t always want to live for love, but hey, maybe it doesn’t suck as badly as I thought. And maybe, it doesn’t have to suck as badly for you, either. The perspective of love as a “grand passion” makes me think about the extent of love’s suckiness, and I think it’s possible to look at love as more of a something to live for. We take the suck with the passion, and we’ll figure out the rest. Until then, love still sucks.
Just maybe not as badly as it did before.
Shared by: MK Morris