the lack of compassion and why love has lost meaning

i've been reflecting a lot recently on what type of love i want for myself in the future. truthfully i've been more so reflecting on today's perception of love and how that will affect my luck in love as i come across it.

honestly i don't have much of an inclination to be dating right now. i've found a lot of comfort in my solitude, but like any other girl who has the misfortune of being hopelessly devoted to romance i do wonder about what the love of my life will be like.

i know many people who don't believe in having more than one but i guess i always believed we'd have at least three monumental loves of our lives. i mean the person i had once thought was the love of my life wasn't even anything more than the love of two years. it ended abruptly and at the worst of terms, so how could that have been the love of my life?

a man recently said to me that i couldn't break his heart, because he had already lost the love of his life. truthfully the sentiment didn't hurt me - the opposite actually. i almost felt bad for him. the way he seemingly has no expectation of having any other great love in his life. i mean after disappointment came, even in the deepest parts of me - i always knew i still believed love would find me. not that i particularly wanted to suddenly take over that role in his life or anything, but it made me wonder about how we know we've "lost" the loves of our lives.

growing up my definition of the term "love of my life" was so monumental. it was a love that was groundbreaking, where a day without it felt like a day without air. where you needed to do everything in your power to get them back if something happened. where looking at other people leaves you feeling nothing, where you'd be repulsed at the idea of even holding another hand if it wasn't theirs.

but seemingly, our definitions were a little different.

how do we know in our early twenties that we've lost something so pivotal, so important, so passionate???? i'm not saying you cannot be in love and meet your person when you're young - the contrary ; i do believe you can find the love of your life early in life, i just believe the definition is a little frazzled now.

i think love used to start differently than it used to. sure people used to meet at bars back then too, but i think the intention was different. people would see each other in person often - not just send texts back and forth. people would go on actual dates - now hanging out as been dubbed as "linking" and oftentimes is just a front for trying to get in your pants. people don't "woo" each other anymore. there's no intention of growing something. nobody is buying flowers just because, or at least without any ulterior motive. there isn't any serendipity in how people are meeting. now people will find you online - instagram, tiktok, snapchat, etc and like what they see ; so you connect. send meaningless pictures back and forth, use your best online pick up lines and eventually something may come of it. or you just end up in a inbox of what if's.

we repost things about bringing back yearning like the type we read about in our books and watch in our movies but simply texting first is too much??? we've severely lost the plot and though i'm not much better - frankly i am the embodiment of a hypocrite. even today in an exchange with paige i said i refused to compliment a man simply because i knew other girls would possibly do the same. which is the dumbest thing ever and made me feel like i'd lost some brain cells - but this is the problem. why do we feel like it's the most intimate thing nowadays to even properly compliment someone ???

i think we are too used to the instant gratification to acknowledge the fact that most love stories had build up of emotion. we are so accustomed to the instant satisfaction of receiving a story like on instagram that we have damaged our perception of affection. we don't compliment anyone sincerely anymore - just a simple tap and i'm suddenly floored and showing all my friends as if he had just written me a five page love letter. we have become so painfully numb to affection that we genuinely let ourselves believe that this is normal and this is actually a way to show we are interested in someone. when in reality all it means is "think ur hot - tap" like why did we make this some groundbreaking revelation of a proposal of interest? and why do we avoid even showing this bare minimum attempt at affection?

now this isn't to be confused with some new godly purity culture rhetoric - i do think sex shouldn't be some taboo hidden topic, and i don't judge anyone for how they want to get their rocks off ; but i do think the concept of hookup culture has become so normalized it's almost made us desensitized to love.

i think we've confused the terms lust and love. he didn't text you at 2am because he was up all night daydreaming about starting a life with you now did he? we've lost our expectations of romance. people mistaking lust for passion, and love bombing as romance.

and maybe i'm no better than the rest, i've been burned and it shows. i am unfortunately the worst flirter and painfully oblivious to people flirting with me. i'm truthfully quite rude to men i actually am attracted to - almost as if subconsciously i'm testing them. if you can handle me at my bitchiest surely you can handle anything. maybe i only feel safe talking to "bad guys" because when they hurt me i can't be surprised, because i was already anticipating it.

but that only makes it worse, why am i choosing to anticipate hurt over love? people - including myself are too willing to settle for the bare minimum. you don't know my favorite flower, but you can describe all the ink on my skin. it makes no actual sense and truthfully it makes me quite embarrassed of how i may have acted in the past to feel like someone actually cared about me.

i think we have also misconstrued what necessarily contributes to who gets to be the loves of our lives. romance doesn't just have to come through partners. if it's so easy for me to love my friends, then surely that is a guarantee that the love i pour into others can be possible to receive. people have gotten so comfortable in acting nonchalant that we've become all masters of this charade that we can't be affected by anything - we're too "cool" for that. i think it's rooted in a fear that if we don't do enough then we can't be "too much" - but when did that become the worst thing we can be. why do we want to only show half emotions? why is it lame to wholeheartedly care about something, and want to invest our time and energy into watching it grow? isn't the most beautiful part of falling in love the process of being ready to so blindly and passionately throw yourself into the relationship because you have faith the other person will be there to catch you?

i also think this is rooted in the idea that love has to always be easy. i'm not saying stay with some asshole who makes you feel worthless or anything but just because you guys have one disagreement that's too much? it's unattainable to expect vows like "for better or for worse" to mean anything if we actually hold no semblance of wanting to maintain that. why do we expect that love is unconditional in how we receive it, but conditional in how we are willing to give it. it makes no real sense and it's a thought that makes me slightly uncomfortable; more so in the harsh reality it means putting myself through but i mean the point still stands.

it’s like how many people post wanting a relationship like noah and allie, or ben and andie, but fail to also account for the emotional turmoil these fake relationships also maintained? that these are fictional stories carefully curated to fulfill a desire we as consumers have. why do we feel we are only capable of accepting the good and that we are too high and mighty to actually work for a relationship. and duh no relationship is perfect and many aren't meant to last forever and are simply just lessons. but the process of trying to understand how this became the norm always seems to leave me frazzled and inconclusive.

like many others i see relationships online and even though i try not to - i sometimes get envious. i'm only human ok. it happens. we see couples post all of their highlights as if it's an athlete posting their best moments in a game. and we watch and we compare. we ask ourselves why we don't have a love like that, why doesn't my partner do that, why can't i have that if it exists, and subconsciously we just destroy our perceptions of love. but because we saw a few instagram posts curated just for our perceptional wants, we've decided we need unattainable love stories - not meaningful ones necessarily, but aesthetically pleasing ones at the least. we watch these incandescently candid moments posted because it is their literal jobs to have these moments captured and yet we wonder why we don't have them. but surely we realize that not every special moment will be able to be captured as normal people with normal lives. don't we? but if we did why do we still expect it?

i feel like i'm rambling now - i don't have some groundbreaking solution to provide in how to get out of this weird cycle of disappointment, and i don't know how many loves we will have in our lives or how we'll know we have found the love of our lives. but i guess i just wanted to share my findings of my thoughts. maybe you'll find comfort in knowing you're not alone. or you won't. i don't know.

irregardless, hope you got something out of this and if you didn't - oops.

xo,

belle.