Love.
We seek it, we need it. Baseline desire strives to put someone higher: adore, admire, and love. Four letters so simple in formulation, difficult in design, impractical in mine. Love. The hard line for so many of us in line to greatness. To happiness. To bliss. What is your limit, your line? Set yours dead fast and permanent in the constant rotation of the earth. Build a barrier higher than the night watcher’s wall; admiration is given to those willing to crumble. I am a skeptic of love: nothing more than a chemical imbalance of the brain. Peace for pieces of a soul worth reaching, worth touching.
Prepare me for the climb, the trek.
Soulmate: a person ideal for another as a romantic partner, is a fairly new word created by the good ‘ole American dream. If you ask Google, the word first started appearing in search engines around 1976. Before then, no one had time for that. Dreams don’t fall from the sky. In the past, people were often married because it served a functional purpose. Make babies, create a workforce, leave your seed, expand and inherit the earth. Love was scarcely a factor in the process of love, and the term soulmate surely pulled no weight. If you consider the process behind the function of love, you will find that in most cultures marriages are or were arranged. Likewise, these are the most successful in longevity. However, this is not necessarily causation; more so correlation because you also have to consider that most cultures and religions are not in support of divorce. America and western culture is at the forefront of manufacturing the idea of the romantic experience.
Today, soulmates and romance fill our hearts and lifestyles, because, you know, us Americans and millennials believe, and know, we deserve better. Our independent tendencies tell us we deserve happiness, the best, and most important–the choice. The societies we have created tell us, make your choice. Love is in your hands. But remember; if you are lonely on Valentines, you are a social pariah. I say nah. And most likely when valentine’s rolls around, I will being saying “suhhh” to my other lonely homies. But it’s chill. Plus, if you really knew the basis of Valentines you may laugh at the romance we have attached to it. Remember that Valentines was a pagan holiday where women were flogged with fresh and bloodied pieces of animal skin. This, of course, promoted fertility. And then, we have the defiant and famous Saint Valentine, a man of God who died a martyr on February 14th. Valentine protected the sacred bondage of love by secretly and illegally marrying the soldiers of incubus Claudius Gothicus the II.
Valentines is and always has been a morbid situation. And, fortunately for us, Saint Valentine died saving love and its primary display of marriage. Thanks to him we now spend $14 billion annually to court the ones we love, lust, and swoon for. But beside the material and caloric gain of Valentines, it is important to note that love is everywhere. All anyone has to offer is their love. The rule with life, love, and everything in between, is that it just happens. You just happen upon your passions and let them fully encompass you. A sort of an active laziness that only the soul knows. A soulmate is that thing that just happens; swallowing you up, forcing your innards to burn with aching desire to be connected by a playful secret that will never lead to deception. You cannot look for your soulmate. It is just supposed to happen. Love is when you want someone to know your soul, when they know some you in past generations. I am a child of thousands of generations. Do you know me?
[Image courtesy of Madison Ryan, Redlands Bulldog photographer]
