Hello again. I know I haven’t written in a while, but that is because – being a card carrying cheapskate – I refuse to pay for Internet. Whenever I need the Internet, I use my computer at work, but honestly – who wants to sit at work after hours and do personal things? I don’t. I used to pirate off of other people’s Internet at home, but that trick hasn’t worked for a couple years now. Apparently the masses are getting smarter and actually placing passwords on their home wireless accounts.
Seeing as how I don’t want to sit at my office after hours, I had assumed blogging was something I wouldn’t get back to until I broke down and finally purchased home Internet coverage. That was when a friend and former professor of mine suggested I actually write the posts at home in word, and post them at work the next day I went into the office. GENIUS! I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t thought of that, but then again… I am atrociously handsome, not atrociously intelligent.
Today, I went to a store – I won’t mention which store – but it’s a HUGE international chain where it is possible to buy groceries, underwear, wine, get photos developed, and test a ride a bike – all while dodging falling prices. I don’t particularly care for this chain, but it serves its purpose, and I’m a poor person – beggars can’t be choosers. The store, however, is not what this post is about. While waiting in the checkout line, I came across one of those celebrity gossip magazines. I don’t remember, which one, but again – not important. A small close-up picture of Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez appeared in the top right hand corner of the cover with a large caption that read: “Selena and Justin, pictures that prove IT’S LOVE.”
Hmm. I stared at the cover and re-read the caption. I had a while to ponder this – for the store never has enough clerks to check people out in a timely fashion. Justin Bieber is what? 16? I don’t know, I don’t have Bieber Fever. (I do however see the irony in this since my last post also mentioned Justin, but to be fair, most of my posts do not…) And Selena Gomez must be around the same age. (I had always assumed she was older, but for better or worse again, I don’t keep up with tweenage heart-throbs.) My question , however, was can you really be in love at that age?
I’m not sure anyone really knows what love means when they’re that young. Love is idealized so often in our culture, and young teenagers are really susceptible to that idealization. I know when I was 16 I thought I was in love, and I thought that many of the attractions I had for people were “love.” By the time I was 18, however, I knew that at 16 I had no idea what real love was. I had only been going through the motions. I was repeating what every love song and teenage movie had taught me. I was doing what was expected. I didn’t begin following my bliss until I was 20, and by the time I turned 21, and actually fell in love, then my 18 year old concept of love no longer applied, and my 16 year old version seemed as backwards as the Dark Ages.
When I first fell in love, I fell hard, and I fell quickly. It was as if all of those prior teenage moments had built up to that point. Love made sense. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. Hindsight, however, is better than 20/20. Now at 27, I realize that at 21 I was still idealizing love. I had fallen in love with who I wanted him to be – not who he actually was. I had fallen in love with the idea of “us,” and not the daily reality of “us.” I’m glad now that that relationship ended. It ended almost as abruptly as it began, with a flurry of emotion, and left me rather love-bruised. If we had continued, one day we would have woken up and not recognized each other.
I understand love differently now. I get that it isn’t all powerful emotion, that fights don’t magically end like they do in movies and on TV, and that nothing is ever black and white, but varying shades of gray. The one thing our culture gets right, however, is that love is a beautiful thing. It is something worth having, worth pursuing, worth losing. Beauty, however, is not the same as pretty. I understand that love isn’t always pretty, sometimes it’s ugly, sometimes it’s dirty, love has scars, beauty marks, and wounds. It takes life experiences to teach us this part. Pretty things are not always beautiful, and beautiful things are not always pretty.
Please don’t think that I understand love. I still don’t. All I really know is that at 27 – I understand love a lot more clearly than I did at 16. My definition of love has grown, deepened, expanded, and changed radically. I know that at 37, I will look back and my definition of love will have evolved yet again. (Hopefully at that point I will have found someone I can share my life with, and we will be learning together.) I’m not sure humans can ever fully grasp love, but why not try? Isn’t part of the human condition to learn as much as possible? To grow and evolve? Hopefully one day, I will understand love as much as a human can. Until then I will keep searching for it.
If love is such an indefinable concept that evolves as we age, how am I supposed to believe that Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez have found it? And that photos somehow prove it? Pictures – while worth a thousand words – can often be deceiving. Needless to say, I didn’t buy the magazine; I didn’t even flip through it to look at the pictures. I didn’t need to, it’s just another magazine using “love,” to try and sell product. It would probably be too much to ask for the magazine to take a different angle – love sells, and so do tweenage heartthrobs. Why not capitalize on the commodity? Hopefully, Justin and Selena will look back on those photos someday, and laugh at the caption that so inaccurately describes their current relationship. Hopefully their concept of love will have evolved as well.
Update: Right after I wrote this post, I actually broke down and purchased wifi. Still a card-carrying cheapskate, because I only bought the base package, but I can always upgrade…
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