onsdag 28 september 2011

The components of love (or possibly a murder-suicide situation)

Today I will embark on a journey to investigate a throughout history up until now completely untouched subject; love. I know, so original, right? I sometimes even impress myself with my extraordinary wits and innovation. Having spent much of my teens absorbed into stories of eternal love such as The Iliad, The young Werther, Doctor Zjivago and The Dreamers, all with joyous and satisfying endings, my conception of love has become just a tad distorted;  it is only love if someone either kills themselves in the end or spend the rest of their life in heart retching agony, longing for their loved one. Quite a leap from modern youngsters' notion of what constitutes love; a sequence of <3<3<3<3<3 on each others' facebook walls and then having a subtle and romantic "so... wanna fuck?" texted to them at 3 am. I remember being fourteen and having my first boyfriend when having a sudden epiphany: Would this boy cross seas to retrieve me from Troy? Would this boy endure emotional torment for years, never giving up hope of my return? Would this boy resolve to suicide if he realized that we could never be together? The simple answer was no; he would poke me on Facebook, drunk dial me in a very non-Romeo-serenade-on-the-balcony fashion and tell me I was probably a lesbian. I thanked him for enlightening me, hung up and returned to reading for a couple of years. Loved, lost and puked in boys' trash bins. Met a boy, loved him dearly for three years, and then one day woke up realizing that our love had faded away a long time ago, why I really couldn't say, and left was just the fear of losing each other entirely and at the same time the fear of never fulfilling our dreams, growing old, bitter and complacent.

And then I met him. He made me laugh until I couldn't breathe, he woke me up in the middle of the night, giddy as a child, telling me he had the best dream ever about dried alcohol and then fell asleep before I could anwer and rushed to my side to comfort me, even when I was hysterically sobbing because I had read a book by a woman of my age who wrote much better than me and wanted someone to hold me and draw Hitler moustasches on the author portrait. A mature way of handling jealousy, pretty much. So from what I have gathered so far, the components of love are trust, affection, similar life goals and a mutual love for dwarves and fetuses in jars. How this hasn't dawned upon all the authors of couple therapy literature is beyond me. Love hurts, and it should, but it is all worth it when you are curled up in a boy's lap, laughing hysterically at an article about a dwarf who shares the exact features of Gordon Ramsay, works in the porno industry and commits suicide by letting himself be eaten by racoons. If that isn't love, I don't know what is.

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