The romantic couple or Trends 2.0
Stuck with your soulmate or doomed to eternal freedom.
Context: 3 years ago, I published for the first time online, all for thrills. No grand ambition was searched just the maybe the feeling of being heard by a stranger. I wanted to share something I felt valuable for others; a lesson I learned by suffering but wished others might save themselves before, although as homo sapiens we are all set to first commit mistakes to ultimately learn from them afterward: no good advice will save us.
A lot of things have changed in my life and definitely I have more than 10n times been a different person but on this, I still have to keep the same idea. Maybe written in a different way you might understand a different flavour of what I’m talking about.
Let’s start with this: we are all social human beings. You may like it or not, but being social is what makes us human and what led our species to develop as it is today.
“Ughh but I’m a introvert I’m not social, I just stay alone and mind my own business”
No, the sole fact of living in a society where work is specialized and divided is already a type of social interaction. Unless you live alone in the wild as a isolated hunter-gatherer, you are somehow a social animal.
Most of us believe our subconscious persona is just how we were born. The case is much more complex: like most of the things in life. We are building on our life experience and social learning. When you are a kid you start to think like your parents and relatives only to discover the real world when you grow older. We copy or oppose our beliefs to the ones we are faced with every day of our life. From believing in a afterlife to whether you should have a boyfriend, all these complex questions need answers, so many uncertainties and mental existential problems to deal with; we get overwhelmed very fast. On top of that you got to worry about your work, making money, and having fun; “Ain’t nobody got time for that philosophical stuff”. So we let all the hard work into our subconscious, it’s thrilled with all the responsibility given and proceeds to do its best job of sorting out all of our deepest doubts ( it does!). We go on to living our lives easier, focusing on the day to problems like what are we having for lunch, who are we going out with tonight, what gift to buy for our mom, what was the score of today’s football game, who started following me on social media. Clearly no time for existential thinking.
Through thousands of years of learning, we have understood that having a partner was the best social deal we could make. Securing the lineage of our DNA, our species, and best of all unconditional ally ( mostly to satisfy selfish needs like protection or social status). Additionally with religions mostly preaching monogamy, finding one sole life partner became an ideal to the modern woman or man, of course, it wasn’t much respect by men in the last century for obvious reasons: women getting the worst out of it.
In 2023 finding a partner isn’t much about these primal needs, it is probably to fulfill unconscious self-purposed needs like social status, social tradition, and the fear of being left alone forever.
Did we ever take a little break to stop and think do we really need this, yearning for something virtually impossible for the rest of our life, feeling blue on a romance that was never even meant to exist? There are so many things we can work on and build, from crazy new athletic skills to expression through complex art, discovering remote corners of the world and our minds. We do not have time to be blue all day long, and much less waste time on a fairy-tale pursuit. The lesson here is; everything in life has to be built, polished, maintained, and cared for. There is no gold oasis and if you want a real companionship then you will have to build it with hard work and sweat, forget about those platonic loves they are wasting your time; the greatest love stories I know survived not because they were meant to be but because they made things work out.
So forget about the queen in her far glitter kingdom, before it’s too late.
Cause a witch told me that:
You will travel day and night,
across desert and jungle, fire and ice.
Conquering one thousand armies. Discovering secret treasures.
Building to lose brotherly friendships.
Falling to get up.
Failing to succeed.
Until your legs give up,
Until your mind breaks a million times,
Until you forget what home is.
And then, in the dawn of darkness.
You will meet the sunrise queen.
You will love her for a week, a month, and over a year.
But late at night in your cold side of the bed.
You will miss home and yourself.
Falling asleep,
Buried in an unchosen tomb forever.
Your forever loving Karim.