THE FIRST QUESTION
Love began, for me, with a question I didn’t know how to answer: what the hell do we mean when we say “love”?
Look around the classroom, or in your feeds if you are browsing late at night, and you will see how effortlessly my generation plays with that word. We throw it everywhere. In dump account bios, hashtags, or just random chats, using it to brighten our otherwise boring commutes, or because we are lonely and scared to be single. It fills the empty space of a conversation. It feels good to type when everyone else is doing the same.
I remember two lovebirds in my Section who “fell in love” after three weeks of talking to each other. Three weeks. Not enough time to properly know the other person under pressure, yet to them, it was already a lifetime. Every photo was tagged with each other. Every active status was responded to in real-time. Every heart was a vow of eternal love.
Only, overnight, it was all over. The next day, you wouldn’t even know they existed to each other. Bios deleted, archives cleared, the usual drama. Two people pretending to be strangers when passing each other in the hallway.
I think that might have been the first realization for me that something was wrong. Maybe we are not exactly sure what love asks of us yet. Or that, perhaps, we are all so desperately trying to find something that we feel will never ever last, that we are all just overdoing it.
Everything happens in double-time now, be it notifications, trends, or the stages of heartbreak — all because we are so desperate to fill the empty spaces of our lives. We confuse the bare minimum with the ultimate expression of affection. We mistake our own desperation. We are in the midst of a culture that sees a casual text and thinks it is an acceptance. A week later, we are texting again, but the other has moved on, saying that they “need space.” We mistake the thrill of a new experience for substance. We forget that sometimes love is just a patient coexistence. We confuse its most superficial elements with its deepest essence.
I used to think that love meant the movies — when the music is so beautiful and everything looks so good in slow-motion that you could literally just lie there and watch the world go by. But that is not what it is really all about. Because the music stops eventually, and it is only you left alone to return to reality.
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Real feelings don’t always have a soundtrack or a filter. Sometimes it is just the quietness of studying together and doing nothing interesting, staring aimlessly at the ceiling until the laptop goes off and the lights suddenly turn on. And somehow, that is also beautiful.
But it is hard to find beauty in it when everything else is just a competition. Who loves who more? Who texts first? Who messages the other more? Who looks good in their photos? We judge people by the “effort” in their relationships. It’s like the internet made us so competitive that even in matters of the heart, we can only express our affection by calculating and quantifying everything, competing against each other with the most effort points.
Maybe that is not the best way to approach someone. Maybe sometimes people would rather have the security of feeling wanted instead of having to constantly prove how much they want the other.
Perhaps that is why so many of us are so exhausted and so lonely. We are just desperately chasing something that we feel will never last long enough, but we are so scared of being alone that we just keep doing it anyway. When you look back at your chats with a person, it is full of things that you thought made you love each other. Yet, you could still barely talk to them when they needed you to stay.
How often do “most people” get to know each other, really? I think it is hard and lonely to be a member of our generation, because we just continuously drift around looking for someone to tell us what it is we want to hear — even when we do not want to tell them ourselves.
Love used to be something that lasted through time. Now, we just keep using it as a buzzword to see how it sounds in a conversation. We say it to hear how it feels, to experience the emotion however fleeting and superficial it may be.
Maybe I am thinking too much about real love. About finding someone to quietly and patiently grow old with. Because maybe that is what it is really all about.
I think we can only find that kind of love when we stop calculating who loves who, and instead start asking harder questions: Are you really sure you are capable of loving someone? Are you prepared for it?
Because that is the real first question for our generation.
And that is a question none of us are sure of yet.
