Love I Guess

My Perspective

There was a time in my life when relationships meant nothing to me. It was just a term for a girl I messed around with. I fell for the masculine facade most males fall for. From our family, our media, and our schoolmates what being a man is is a plethora of skewed, warped ideas. I never had any positive male figures in my life, most of my family is very violent and rather complain or throw insults than think rationally. Due to this, I was whisked haphazardly into the journey of what it means to love. Love encapsulates so many different things. How we love and who we love can affect or is affected by who we are, and who we are could be broken down into even more categories. To put things into focus, “it’s complicated” in theory and thought but some things are better left experienced.

My Experience

My first experience with "love" was what I consider hilarious today. I dated some girl online at the end of 8th grade until the end of 9th grade. She happened to live in a different state, and lied about her age and talents, so in technicality I was catfished. Love in a person can be disturbingly blind, careless and downright illogical. Maybe heartbreak is our bodies algorithm that fails in order to learn. I consider this a good relationship to learn from. Nowadays we have dating apps that’ll hook you up in hours for a quick fling. I think technology is a good tool to connect lovers but not the best for finding them. I truly thought this girl and I would be those online dating success stories where “oh baby, miles can’t separate our love” but it wasn’t.

Love, I guess?

I can’t blame love or my past ignorance of what love is for all of my relational mistakes but I will anyway because this is more about love than my personal issues. I found myself able to date far too many girls in the past most of which I’d categorize into three kind: just because, just for pleasure, just for looks.

"Just because" is more of a meaningless friendship that didn’t have to become a relationship, but did anyway because y’all “shipped it.” It’s not gonna go anywhere and ultimately wastes both of your time, you don’t learn, or grow, it just ruins a once good friendship. It’s the “I love you as a friend but idk what love really is so I assume friendship is love as it’s the closest thing to it.”

"Just for looks" is sadly a large chunk of my relationships. I don’t just date them for their looks and they don’t just date me for mine but we date each other because of how we look in public. This kind of relationship was full of “goal” status activities, selfies, and parties. It’s just a fling that’s gone on for too long. In my ignorance I said “I love you” to a few of these shallow relationships. One of the most toxic in my opinion. It’s the “I love you because you’re so hot...and you’re hot” kind of hookup.

We all know about the old "just for pleasure" kind of love. It’s existed since the beginning of time. But for a person of ignorance (like myself at one point) sex is more than just sex, it’s a connection to another human being. Which may be true, however, you get in the mindset that there really isn’t anything besides sex anyway. This is the “I love you because I’m obsessed with sex, but I won’t admit it or I’m too blinded to know better” kind of relationship.

Learning From It

So I’ve made a lot of mistakes when it comes to love. Admittance or not, they were all for some form of pleasure, like it or not. Whether it was to appease other people, impress other people, for looks or sex, it was all for some form of personal gain. Eventually I got bored from it all and I’m glad I did; most people are still in the process of being catfished. I had to wake up and realize love wasn’t so shallow and love isn’t for my gain. And my current girlfriend helped me realize love was about both of us bringing out the best in each other, us growing together, learning together. It’s occasionally about the “goals,” clichés, and romantic gestures. Love encapsulates a massive amount of good things and when I learned I get more joy from a smile on that girl's face than I do anything else was when I realized I was really in love. That’s when I realized what it’s like to be loved in a way no other person can love you but your spouse.