Questioning Love Through the Mind of a 16-Year-Old Boy
What is love? I use to believe it didn’t really exist in the form everyone refers to it. I thought that it was just an emotion produced from chemicals and hormones in the brain and that the whole “spiritual, emotional bond” that 2 people in love felt was for the sole purpose of keeping the man and women together for child bearing. I believed it all to be just a “instinct” and to have no real significance. After examining the harshness of how I felt I realized that almost of the “human” experiences can be summed up some how by use of just instinct, but without these key feeling and emotions then we wouldn’t be human. So if by definition these feelings make us human, then they can’t just be instinct without logical or spiritual purpose otherwise we would have no distinction between an animal.
Humans are the only species who have sex for the pure purpose of pleasure even when procreation is impossible. I’m not referring to birth control, a woman is fertile for only a fraction of the days in one month, but her sex drive remains fully active throughout that entire time. Most animals have sexual experiences that last a minute at the most, while humans like to draw out the act for mutual pleasure and to draw each partner closer to the other. How come so many movies end in two people in love embracing each other and why does that make humans feel so good? I know whenever I watch a beautiful love story on TV or on the theater part of me inside feels a pure sense of happiness and pleasure when two people in love are able to be with each other. That may be because I have never been in love and when we are so taken in by a good movie that we live through the screen and share the emotions with the characters. I so want to fall in love that maybe I just associate this “great” feeling with what I hope will happen in my real life experiences granted I ever do find that “special” one. Speaking of that “special” one, who says there is somebody for everyone? There are more men in the world than women, so unless we have a lot of homosexual couples then somebody has to be missing out. So what if you were the one who didn’t have somebody you were destined to be with. How depressing would that feel? To know that you would always be looking, but would never really find anything.
Does destiny even really exist? Are we really destined to be with someone? Or is it up to us to find someone with a similar mind and coerce them into falling in love with us. Why do so many people swear they are in complete love with someone to later on have their heart destroyed and then to just repeat this cycle over and over again. Does it really feel better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? Why do so many people have such a problem with intimacy? Is it because in order to get close to someone you have to open yourself up to them and risk being hurt? Why are we so afraid of being hurt? I’d rather feel the pain of once being in a passionate relationship that ended badly then the loneliness of a empty heart still searching for someone special and never having found anyone. What do we learn from each of our “love” experiences? Do we really learn from our mistakes or do we just repeat them over and over again in different ways?
Do really passionate people find it easier to fall in love, while serious, less emotional people suffer. Why are people shy? You know that you are attracted to someone and that you like them. So why is it hard to talk to them or hard to say what you want to say? How come the right words are very hard to say sometimes? What is sex without love? The physical sensation is the same, so is anything really missing? Why does it feel much better afterwards when your lying with someone you really care about? Does sex and love really have anything to do with each other? If you can have sex without love, then why not love without sex? How about sex with other people while your in love with someone else? Can you be in love with more than one person and how could each love be real? Isn’t the definition of love include an intimacy between only 2 people? What about Internet relationships? Do you have to have met someone to be in love with them? Does love have to include the physical attraction or could two complete strangers fall in love with each others words?
How come when most of these people meet they no longer have the same sense of “love” they felt before? Are they some how broadcasting their past emotions and their hopes onto the screen and no really seeing the real person they barley know? Are these people love sick? Does one ever truly give up on love or is it something that is always there and we are always hoping to find someday. If we never really do give up on love, then how come so many people claim to have done so? Are they just stating this to take away all pressure on themselves to go out and look for their “special” someone? Are they still secretly hoping that they will somehow on accident find that person? Why do some guys “turn down” love and like to go from women to women on purely a sexual basis never wanting an intimate relationship? Is this because they are scared to get close to someone or that they really only need sex and nothing else? What are they really looking for and what happens when they become bored with just sex?
How about the women they prey on who think they are in love to find that they have been used. Where they really in love or just suffering from the “might be” or “want to be”? The “might be” is a state of mind which makes us as humans feel really good. The hope of what might be or what might happen is a good feeling. For example on the drive to a party a person feels really good in excitement and anticipation of the “might be”. The “might be” is what gives us hope and encouragement, for some reason we seem to always have it even when in the past it as always gone wrong. The “want to be” is a state where a emotional person wants something to happen so bad that he or she will see it that way even if intellectually it isn’t happening. I believe that most of the women say they are in love with a guy who cheats on them all the time are living in the “want to be”. I think that they know they are not in love and that the guy they are with is not in love with them, but they feel so bad inside and they so need some kind of a relationship that they cling on to what they have and try to see it in the best way possible. They completely live in the “want to be”. What role does society play in love?
Is the society we live in best setup for people to find each other and fall in love? How come so many different people go to bed dreaming of love and wake up the same way? In out very busy lives have we kind of put off the concept of love a little bit? Are we not seeing what’s really there and who is really out there? When we go to clubs or go out are we just following a routine? Do we really know what it takes to find someone and have a meaningful relationship? What about break ups? How come after a painful breakup part of us always wants to take some kind of revenge or show the other person how “well” we are doing afterward. If we really loved the person why would we want to take any kind of revenge at all? Is it because the break up also ends our illusions of what we thought the relationship was and were we thought it was going? Are we so hurt and surprised that all we can think about is releasing the pain we feel?
