You Expect Too Much From Love (And That’s Why You Can’t Find It)

Let’s admit it already – romantic love is totally overrated.

Sure, you may have been in love once or a couple of times or maybe not at all.

You may have experienced the fireworks from the hormonal stages of the honeymoon phase, but it doesn’t last long because that’s just the chemicals in your body talking.

You may be nostalgic about a long-lost love who you think was the ‘love of your life’, but only because it was cut short by circumstance, and you’ll never really find out.

You may have romanticized the ‘what if’ of unrequited love in your idealized imagination, until you actually get to know the person with their flaws and imperfections.

You may have met someone you admire who inspired you to change your life, but it wasn’t them that changed you. You changed yourself because you always had it in you, you just weren’t aware of it.

You may have experienced the unbelievable feeling that you’ve never felt this way before, until they make you feel the worst ever or until you meet someone else who makes you feel even better.

You may have found your perfect soulmate, until you realize that they were simply pretending to be somebody other than whom they really are.

We think we’ve found it, until we realize that the person wasn’t right, the timing wasn’t right, this love wasn’t right. So we start again and search more, or we bide our time and trust in fate. Yet, it always remains at the back of our heads like some kind of unfinished business, an unforgivable itch that needs to be scratched, a compulsive checklist that needs to be ticked someday.

So many people make love the main motivating reason behind everything they do, whether they are self-aware of this or not.

It’s the reason they don’t work on finding their purpose and passion because they expect love to do it for them. It’s the reason they work unfulfilling jobs to make more money. It’s the reason they buy ridiculously overpriced things to make themselves more attractive. It’s the reason they hop on and off trains and flights. It’s reason they do irrational, emotional things and call it that crazy little thing called love.

Love lets us down time and again, and yet we throw in all our cards, gamble all our chips, jump right into the deep end, and then wonder why it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. It almost always turns into a huge fucking disappointment, because one of us almost always reaches a stage of letting it the fuck go. Sometimes people are strong enough to walk away, sometimes they stick together because they’re too tired to try again.

Since when did we put so much faith in something so nebulous and uncertain that it becomes the most important thing in our lives? Is it because it’s so uncertain that we are so attracted to it? Are we more in love with the ‘idea of love’ that nothing seems to ever match up because no one knows what it really is? People have written, danced, sung and created awe-inspiring, beautiful things to describe this indescribable feeling, but no one has ever been able to define it with the actual finality of an indisputable assertion.

See, the thing about love is that it is human just like us, and you can’t hold it to that kind of pedestal, because it will eventually fall. You can’t make it responsible for your happiness. You can’t give it the power to make your decisions and ascertain your choices. You can’t let it give you validation and define your sense of self-worth. You can’t wait for it to start living the life you’ve always wanted to. You can’t let it hold you back from finding deeper meaning and fulfilment within yourself. You can’t expect love to save you from yourself.

The truth is that you expect too much from love, and that’s why it can’t give you what you want.

Only you can do that.