Every day, I am bombarded with cute couples’ content. This happens via all social media channels and pop culture. It would be possible to avoid it if I could avoid pop culture altogether but I am not gonna skip that Britney song and I will definitely be looking at that meme you’ve sent me. But why is pop culture so full of “being in love”? And how did a generation full of young people got obsessed with either having a partner or falling in love?
Fundamentally, science explains the process of falling in love by certain biochemical reactions that take place in your brain, namely your amygdala. However, these reactions aren’t permanent, and if they were, your lifespan would be affected by them. Mainly, this whole biochemical process functions as a trigger point where you can establish a very close bond with another human being that involves sexuality to some extent (not excluding ace people here). So, it is normal for you to not feel fireworks after three years, it is good even because what is left from a relationship after the fireworks are gone is the real deal.
I won’t be talking about relationship dynamics much but I want to talk about the concept of love. I went through the biochemical process shortly and I believe there are components such as societal expectations, upbringing, etc. in this process taking place but in pop culture, love is portrayed way differently than the simple process of falling in love and it made me really wonder if it was always like this.
I wondered because I knew it wasn’t quite possible for things to have been this way for centuries, so what has changed? We used to mate for reproduction and safety. Even though, marrying for love is a recent development in human history, love in itself is fairly old. In Ancient Greece, there were six types of love. The one relevant to this post was called “eros” which as you might have guessed has been derived from the word erotic and interestingly it also meant “life energy”. Quite Freudian.
Accepting, romantic love as a source of life energy would explain the obsession with falling in love and having a relationship to an extent, however, the pattern I’m observing is a bit different.
What I see is people idealizing relationships to escape the meaninglessness of their lives. In a way, romantic love becomes a drug that numbs the pain of your real issues. As if, love is being invented synthetically to cause pain & pleasure but in a fake manner. So, people are using fake pain to avoid real pain.
In today’s society, experiencing upset due to a broken heart is well accepted and it’s even reflected in our music, movies, and so on but expressing distress regarding other relationships or subjects is not very common. Everyone knows they will die, but we refrain from talking about it openly. It is excruciatingly painful to watch your family grow old and experience illness but this is also considered too heavy to talk about. Romantic love and heartbreak give us a safe out to talk about all the pent-up pain. I could argue, the upset which is a result of rejection has more to do with other life experiences than love itself.
Seeing this playing out over and over again made me realize, people who want to desperately fall in love are essentially running away from something. Usually, having to build a life or take responsibility. Unfortunately, the idea of romantic love has become some sort of Novocaine, the drug itself numbs you enough that you are left off further from falling in love for real.
It is most scary to see a generation full of young people chasing this. If you are ever interested in spiritual practices -for good reason too- you will see rooms full of young women practicing spirituality for the sake of, well dating. It used to be that, romantic love was to make you reach godly love and now god is forsaken for 21st-century dating. Even god is less meaningful than romantic love for some, which points out how serious of a crisis we’re in when it comes to life, meaning, and divinity. It is also explanatory of why we see so many puritanic ideas becoming a trend and people forming around it religiously.
Breaking the hold of conservatism and religion in the 21st century has been one thing but filling the huge gap it leaves behind might be more challenging than the latter.
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