What the hell is love?
And why do modern humans invest so much time, effort, money, and other commodities in finding it? Beyond the biological need to reproduce and spread your genetic material far and wide (which is apparently illegal in most countries, who’d've known eh?), there’s a deeper, sharper desire to find something indefinable, something that shakes the ground you walk on and makes you dizzy, something that changes you completely in an instant, and over the span of years.
Google trots out Princeton U’s definition which kicks off with ‘a strong positive emotion of regard and affection’. Ah, clinical. So, modern man traverses the globe in a quest for a strong positive emotion eh? We’re all just slaves to an obscure bio-chemical process that affects our neurological punishment/reward system?
‘I’d give my life, I’d sacrifice years, for a fuzzy chemical reaction inside my brain that makes me fawn over someone else’.
‘I’d walk the rocky road to hell and back, barefoot, for her regard and affection’.
Actually, that last one sounds vaguely Victorian. Definitely velvet-smoking-jacket and monocle territory. There’s something about that potent emotional state – human beings do weird things. They’ll go completely out of character, make great sacrifices, and do some completely futile things, all in the name of an ill-defined emotion that, far from being cultural, seems to be a key part of the human psyche.
It’s even more fascinating when it’s one-sided. One person’s devotion to another, who could be completely oblivious to the fact. Some people will live their entire lives bearing some kind of sputtering torch for someone who may never know they even exist. It’s the possibility of that emotion that seems to spur them on, the imagined promise of an earthly Eden where everything will make sense, and everything will fall into place. Maybe that’s a reflection of our deep-seated hatred of being helpless animals, the rage of being naked against the night and day if it weren’t for technology. Humans in the wild? Out on the plains? Easy fodder for lions, prone to death by exposure, malnourishment, or the simple, excruciating death by starvation or thirst. We need to at least pretend to be in control, to be able to order and construct things, or we’d die of pure helplessness. A dog can cope quite effortlessly, lost in the wilds – a human? Well. We’ve lost the wild edge.
Humans are incredibly illogical and bizarre. And I’m one of them.
