I’m Looking For Love In A World That’s Become Sceptical Of Love…

Love is a requirement for me, a requirement that surpasses my need to have sex. Am I broken?

I wonder if my ideas of intimacy, love and relationships are flawed. I take a good look around the room – almost everyone in the room has had more flings than I had relationships. I am a unicorn, as a friend puts it.

I remember having a discussion on how sex and love are unrelated, with two different friends at two different times in my life. Being able to have sex without any emotional attachment is liberating, they say. Sex is a requirement, not to be confused with Love, they tell me. I don’t understand. I nod, though.

While I was struggling to get out of a toxic relationship, questioning my ideas of what I believed to be the forever kind of love, the world around me was going through a revelation of its own – that love was not necessary for sex after all. When I finally emerged out of my stupor, and ended a relationship that had pretty much obliterated my sense of self, the world had moved on to a renaissance of sexual liberation, a world in which I could not fit in.

The rules to fit in were simple – throw the idea out the window that love was necessary to get intimate with someone. I could not do that. I could throw my prudence out the window, but Love, Love stayed with me, like a bunch of old letters, college notes and some flowers pressed between pages of a book, kept carefully inside a cardboard box that I carried from one apartment to another every time I shifted.

‘Forever’ is a long time…

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t judge people who have sex with someone without the promise of a relationship – they intrigue me. I feel, sometimes, I would be better off if I could pull this off – this whole hook-up thing. I can’t. I stop talking to a guy if I don’t feel an intellectual and emotional connection with him.

But don’t let me wander. Let’s come back to the present. I feel like a unicorn, surrounded by all these people who have slept with more people than I have had friends. I feel small. Why can’t I shrug off this skin which has clearly gotten old and is in need of being discarded? I don’t fit.

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Someone calls my name. They pass me a drink. I smile and take it. Drowning my sorrows in alcohol – I can’t do even that. I process my grief, address my mistakes, never drown out my sorrow in alcohol.

I am looking for love in a world that has become sceptical of love, which sees love as a weakness. It is a world that moves fast, running away from a possibility of love, and a ‘forever’ kind of relationship.

No one wants ‘forever’ anymore. ‘Forever’ sends a chill down people’s spines. ‘Forever’ is a long time. It is full of the unknown and unknown is always scary. I have battled the scary and I know that sometimes what we know turns out to be scarier than what we don’t.

So while everyone around me runs away from ‘forever’. I stick around, although nervously, wondering if I am doing the right thing. I don’t have a choice, I guess. Even if I tried to abandon this quest for forever, I could not.

Deep down I wish for ‘forever’. I wish for love. I wish for cold winter mornings spent lying beside the one I love and who loves me back.

Image via Unsplash

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