With the holidays quickly approaching, it can be hard to be alone. You start or maybe already feel like it is your fault. But why?
It is because it has been normalized to be in “love”. But what really is love?
Love should conquer all. It should be the sword to slash through all of your metaphorical dragons and bond you with your one and only.
Right?
It should at least be more important than money, which is often posed as the evil temptation designed to lure you away from love. As children, we asked: If you had to choose between love and money, which would you choose? The answer was obvious of course, you had to choose love or else you were greedy. With age, the connotation becomes a little more subtle; we assume the woman with the older man is a gold digger, or that the unmarried, childless lawyer chose her job and financial comfort over a family.
Unfortunately, for women the choice often is one between love and money. People still draw from the traditional, and non-existent, nuclear family—the husband, wife, two kids and white picket fence—to assume women will leave their jobs once they marry or are expecting. This even begins in college, where girls study for an “MRS” degree, i.e. they attend college to find a husband.
However, obstacles in this love-above-all theory appear when the partners grow and mature and not in the same direction. Maybe both change or maybe one realizes there was a lot more to the other than what she/he/they thought initially. You trusted the permanence of love and sacrificed your career to follow your heart, and now the love isn’t there anymore and you wish you weren’t either.
None of this is to say that money is more important than love. It’s the emphasis on romantic love that’s the issue. Not only for how it perpetuates an ability to trump all material realities, but for all the people it isolates. It assumes a monogamous heterosexual relationship, and implies that anyone who identifies as aromantic or asexual must have something wrong with them, some trauma or event they aren’t dealing with.
And it implies that those who chose to commit to another individual must be unhappy and unfulfilled. But a woman without a romantic partner who loves her college, career, friends, family, etc. would seem to have a far greater chance at happiness than someone who designed her life around another and found the most realistic thing about romantic comedies to be their two-hour time frame.
People can find others to love and spend their lives with, but in those cases there is usually more than what we conceptualize as romantic love between them. There is probably respect, which is what we should have for everyone’s decisions, including whether or not someone pursues a romantic relationship.
That also includes self-respect. If you’re in college and asked to sacrifice your aspirations for someone else, take a moment to think what is being asked of you. Are you selfish for wanting to develop yourself, or is society selfish for expecting you to do so?
Perhaps respect for ourselves and one another is the sword we can each use to battle our own dragons and prepare for the winter and holiday season.