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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

L is for the way you look at me

As promised from my previous post, here we go on the thought process as to not believing in love. This is something I've argued a lot with myself about, so hopefully it won't get too disjointed, although knowing me it will be anything but easy to comprehend.

Here's a link to an awesome, sem-related Oglaf comment for those of the tl;dr persuasion.

My general philosophy, when not being summed up expertly in the exemplary words of Mr. Brian Kinney:

"I don't believe in love. I believe in fucking. It's honest, it's efficient. You get in and out with the maximum of pleasure, and minimum of bullshit. Love is something that straight people tell themselves they're in, so they can get laid. And they end up hurting each other, because it was all based on lies to begin with." (Season 1, Episode 1)

^ Hearing this was a bit like the first time I stumbled upon the word "bisexual" - a clarifying and amazing experience. I thought, "yes! That's exactly it. Thank you, culture, for putting this neatly wrapped explanation for the way I feel into my lap."


The reason I call myself an agnostic about love is, for me, love is quite like a religion. You have your believers, your disbelievers, your fanatics, and your born-agains. You have people who use "love" as a justification when they can't explain something any other way, and you have people that use "love" to justify doing terrible, horrible things to other people. I have felt that love was something I was supposed to have - that, as the saying goes, "you're nobody until somebody loves you." This is not a, "wah society sucks blah blah oppression" post. It goes deeper than that even. It's not about the image of a white dress with a fancy man in a tux, or the "happily ever after" of 2.5 kids and a white fence. It's not an argument against "the one," and how can one person meet all of your needs blah blah bullshit. It's the idea that regardless of what type of lifestyle you live, there's supposed to be love in it, and if you don't necessarily need that/want it, it makes you weird and you should probably be psycho-analyzed to make sure you aren't saran wrapping people up to murder in your free time.

It's just never made sense to me. Why am I supposed to want it? What does it give me that I don't already have? Why does the use of one small word change things to a point of no return?

Then usually the person I am arguing with brings up the point that I am married, and that I use the word, "love" quite frequently with my spouse.

At which point I usually try to make clear that I didn't go into that relationship looking for love. That I wasn't expecting it, or assuming that I was going to get it just because we were somehow more "exclusive" than any other two random people on the Earth. And that just because we say the word now does not give me some sort of security blanket where either of us can say the other won't decide they've had enough and pack up and leave. We stay together because we want to, because we enjoy each other's time. There's this handy little four-letter word that society and the Oxford English Dictionary has given us to describe it, and so we use it. There's always a little asterisk against it, though, much in the same way as there is when one of us uses the word "wife," or "husband" in public, or when I say, "no, I don't have anything much planned this weekend." And the asterisk is annoying to have to explain every time it comes up, so we don't.

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