Life can be (a) dream

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November 15 - Love is never dead

Love is never dead until you call it so. You must believe the opposite, no matter how difficult it is. Imagine a shivering, scrawny street cat that seems doomed to die. If you think that it has no chance to live and let it be, then it will almost certainly die. If you take it home despite the odds and nurture it, you'll find that the same scrawny cat will spend the next 10 years purring in your lap every night.

It is the same with love. The typical perception of love could not be in a worse state. Everyone has at least heard a horror story, even if they've not experienced one themselves. Girlfriends with OnlyFans! Boyfriends that spend all day gaming and ignoring their unwilling housemaid partners! The hell that is a situationship, let alone a hookup! The fact that the term hookup culture even exists and has its own Wikipedia page! But the very important catch is that all of these situations only describe people that have given up on love themselves. In this sort of environment, we are all starving abandoned cats. Really, though, the only person we're abandoning is ourselves and our own happiness. It seems that every day, more and more people choose to step away from the problem of love entirely. I know of lots of people who stopped trying to find love at all, even if they don't say it that way. This includes people who only date "for fun" instead of for marriage, people who think that they're too much of an outcast, people who think that everyone out there is trash except for them, and people who think that all men only think about sex or that all women are attention whores. For whatever reason, their former ability and want to love turns into something that they cruelly shut off and blame the state of the world on.

But it would be insulting to say that the average person has a completely healthy view of love or of any sort of close relationship at all. Most people who has shut off their ability to love have felt this, and are simply responding to it. This is not necessarily anyone's fault.

I suspect that with prolonged Internet exposure, almost everyone is bound to gain some sort of messed up view of relationships. An unlucky combination of too much exposure and too little luck finding love can lead to the choice to kill off their love. However, I think that "Internet bad" is simply not representative enough of the situation. What about the people who've done all they can to avoid the rotting, corrosive parts of the Internet and still think this way? What are those people to do when they find themselves in a circle of coworkers, friends, or even family who have been fed so much bad information from the Internet? Now, everything bad that our Internet-avoiding person has tried to avoid is staring them in the face every day. They have a concrete example of the exact issues that made them throw their phone into a wall in the first place. The constant exposure to gender wars alone can absolutely rot a person and their ability to love. Logging off of the Internet is simply not enough to avoid the effects of this all. The effects are everywhere, all the time, spread among almost all of the people you know.

What should someone stuck in a group like this do? This person is in a worse and more dangerous situation than someone simply exposed to it through a screen. They have no counter example. Love starts dying not in relationships, but in friendships. They surely won't support their growth. They'll surely give the worst advice and commentary known to mankind: "At least he's prettier than the ones before him! But he's not controllable enough! And, honestly, he's not really tall enough either! Men grow on trees, and you're definitely attractive enough to find someone better!"

Should they stop talking to this circle? Not necessarily. Yes, it is true: this circle may not help them grow. Yes, this circle might damage them if they can't learn how to filter what they hear. But by leaving this circle, the exact mindset that everyone is replaceable is fed into. "This circle of friends isn't fitting my needs, so I should simply find another". No! This is exactly how love never gets the chance to come alive again. Talking to this group will undoubtedly cause more pain, but if someone cannot survive exposure to the idea that people are replaceable, then they will not be able to resurrect their love. In fact, someone stuck in this situation now has the most important and least enviable position of all: they should help teach the others how to love through example. The idea of love can be kept alive by constantly showing it. When someone in the group is heartbroken after a miserable one night stand, they must come to their aid. When someone is considering cutting off a friend of ten years due to a bad vacation together, they absolutely must be the voice of reason against it. All as gently and as lovingly as possible, and without judgement. This is extremely painful to do. And, to make it worse, this will almost certainly become the position of someone trying to resurrect love in themselves eventually. But, without showing it to others, they will never be able to regain it. Learning how to show love in these unfavorable conditions is exactly how someone's opinion of it can slowly be repaired and revived.

Perhaps this makes me look naive or innocent. I can already imagine an older jaded reader thinking that I truly don't understand how bad the situation is, and that it's impossible to rely on the natural goodwill of people. I have already received this complaint. I will be blunt: If this is your opinion, this was written precisely for you. I do not think that people are naturally good at heart, and this is exactly why the idea of love has rotted so far in the first place. I think that people have to be taught how to live with heart and conscience, and that we have a responsibility to at least try to teach this. We are not failures if we do not succeed, but not trying is exactly the same as leaving that same cat from earlier to starve.

I have never felt as miserable and as bitter as when I placed conditions on my ability to love. Choosing not to love breaks your ability to function and robs you of your potential happiness. You need to believe in love in order to reach your full happiness. And with that, I will leave the soapbox alone for some time.