Ever, Ever After

By Shania O’Brien 

I’ve been haunted by love my whole life.

Perhaps it isn’t haunting, but I don’t know how to express the inwrought, fairy-tale sense of longing I feel when I consume instances of what love is supposed to be. Of what relationships have to offer to the human experience, and how there is a need to find all the things you can’t live without and then obsesses over the possibility of abandonment. There is so much out in the world about love, about happily ever after, about how happy endings directly correlate with the attainment of a lifelong partner.  I have never been in love, and I do not know what I am supposed to expect. What will it feel like? A forest full of lightning? A sense of security in the darkest hours of the night? Disappointing real life mundanity? Who knows, honestly? Does it really matter? And what about soulmates? As I understand it, a “soulmate” is granted by someone (or something) with divine agency, not achieved through human effort and contact. You can’t (source: endless romance novels) pick a person and give them parts of your soul. No, it must be predestined, it must be written in the stars, there must be signs leading up to them your whole life. But would we love the same way if romantic love wasn’t the centrepiece of most popular cultural content? Would we love at all? I understand that this concept stems from us being social animals with a basic need to belong; be it with someone else or a particular version of yourself you feel is worthy of being loved.

I’ve seen people treat their relationships as stepping stones they must cross in order to meet “the one.”  It’s all wasted time if it isn’t spent attempting to fulfill your divine purpose: to find your “better half.” But life is only about  that in poetry, and nothing builds character better than a waste of time. It isn’t healthy to go into every relationship expecting it to last forever, to want something tangible out of everything, and it is worse to project preconceived hopes onto people who do not know what you expect from them. Usually if people don’t see an immediate reward, it is a waste. However, I can say with absolute certainty that judging outcomes on the surface level without accounting for what could result from a negative experience is a very universal thought process. Now, I look back on all my wastes of time and thank them for being irreplaceable and teaching me that nothing changes if nothing changes. 

Relationships, like most things, are beautiful because they wear. Accepting that is the first step of stepping out of an echo chamber that repeats “love, love, love.” Besides, healthy and lasting relationships aren’t wished into existence, they aren’t granted, they are fought for. People should not be in love with other people solely because they are in love with the idea of love; because that isn’t love, it is repressed resentment. 

Love is complicated. It’s hard to talk about people that aren’t in your life anymore. Or people that aren’t in your life yet. The chance of finding something earth-shakingly extraordinary always exists, but it isn’t a given; and it definitely isn’t a necessity. I believe in soulmates, but what I believe in more is having the agency to give pieces of my soul to the people who will nurture it and trust me enough to do the same.