The Correlation of Love and Cookie Dough

The air inside of my house was beginning to thicken with an unknown and fuliginous darkness. My eyes could not behold this sight, but my soul was weeping under the strain of the elephantine silence. As moments passed, I began to feel as if an imperceptible scalpel of anguish was impelling me. Placing one foot onto the arctic floor, I began chasing a guide shrouded in insolence out of my room. As this malevolent creature danced around me, clothing my being with his reprobate mire, I began drawing closer to the source of my veiled disdain.

Progressing down the dense hallway, an orange hue began to pulsate as an iris out of the kitchen archway. This evolution of throbbing candlelight gave way to nightmarish possibilities of what lies on the opposite end of the doorframe. My feet sounding as ancient Chinese gongs, ushering in the Spirit of a god, I approached the ominous yet sanguine source of the light. As I entered the kitchen, the waves of candle scent clouded my nostrils, and for a split-second I was heralded to a place bountiful with a promise of a better tomorrow, at least that’s what the commercial for the candle says the sensation of the scent will take you.

After my mind regained clarity to the situation at hand, my eyes began surveying the room for the cause of my invisible torturer. It was then the mother of my distress laid before me, sprawled out upon the kitchen table. It was my beloved sister; her eyes were red with a color unmistakably caused by hours of extreme mental agony. A black river gushed down her face from the melting of her mascara, her hair disheveled from its usual vogue-like state. Sobs of pain cascaded out of her soul in rhythms of a beating drum. It was as if her spirit was creating a song of despair for the entire world to solemnly dance along with it.

With her voice shaking as if she was tumbling down a rocky slope she confessed, “He left me. I thought we were in love, but, he left me.” I knew precisely what she was speaking of. Her true love, the one love that was supposed to complete her just walked out of the door leaving her to question the past two years of her life. As I sat and consoled her, my mind began to wonder whatever happened to that notion of finding one’s true love, and if the conception of having a true love was even eligible in this century.

It seems that everyone is searching for their one love that will absolutely consume every aspect of their need for love. But that leads me to speculate that could our over consciousness of wanting to find that particular human be the beginning of the end? Have we caused ourselves to never find that true love mainly because we are so overly conscious of it? Divorce rates have never been higher, suicide statistics have soared through the roof, and the main reason for both of these is a lack of love in some form or another.

Throughout this haziness of finding one’s love, could a possible reason for this type of love drought be too much sex? If we take a step back and truly open our eyes to the beloved culture we hold so dearly it is very obvious that never in history has sex been so wildly advertised. Even breath mint commercials are taking on a sexy faÃ?§ade to try to boost their sales. Could our obsession with sex be the main reason for our lack of love? We have chosen the sexual fulfillment of our genitals over the fulfillment of our minds. Amazing sex can only last so long, and when the lover gets tired of seeing the same person naked what other qualities does he or she have to stay with that beloved person? As a society we have mistaken lust for love.

Then the question is raised, is it really our fault? This generation has been wired on the standards of sex and any form of sexuality. Never in history have we been so reliant on outside forces telling us the level of morals and values that we are to obtain. The degeneration of our culture begins at the point when we stop looking at ourselves, and starts looking towards other people. Is it possible that these outside influences are having an immense sway on our love lives? Could the constant interception of alien messages to our subconscious be dooming us to a life of uncertainty when it comes to commitment in a relationship?

Considering the affect outside influences have on an individual’s subconscious, should we be angry with ourselves for not finding our true love? Or worse, a person finding the love of their life but completely destroying the relationship because the individual is a self-destructive, insecure, jealous fiend. At this point, we could easily blame the media for our lack of love, but then every human has a free will. The truth is none of us are being forced to do anything; we all have our own mind and can come to our own conclusions. But can these conclusions be altered by our surroundings? I believe the level of oscillation one might experience in this situation solely depends on if he or she is very easily persuaded. We must learn to define oneself without the inclination, no matter how small, from outside forces. It is only when a person finds out who they truly are, that the individual can know what they need to find in a relationship.

Another substantial element added to the shaping of whom we will become as an adult, are our parents and also in some strange way, the parents on television. If you truly dissect all of the relationships that we are supposed to admire and mirror, they are dysfunctional in some form or another. So it is no surprise that from a young age we learn how to function in dysfunction. Whatever happened to the so-called “happy” families that we all grew accustomed to viewing nightly on television? There is a vanishing of the typical cookie-cutter family that had their tough times, yet still ended up mending back together. The reason for the evaporation of this notion is because the deliberation of families mending back together became too unreal. And in a reality driven world, ergo the reality television craze, the happy families became too frivolous. The reality is, 99% of us come from a dysfunctional family in some form or another.

So since this generation is genetically flawed from our parents, both biological and celluloid, it is easy to place the blame on other people instead on oneself. But referring to the latter statement discussing the notion of man’s free will, we all decide what to do and how to act and re-act. Every one of us has the power to decide what exact actions to place into motion. There are individuals that know they are a self-destructive person, and yet they do nothing, or better yet they can’t.

Moving on from the notion of outside influences molding one’s subconscious to relationship failure, another argumentation about the destitution of love is the lack of true communication between two people. I believe that more than half of relationships fail due to an insufficiency of authentic communication. I have noticed that in order to survive the tempestuous waters of love, one must obtain amazing skills in this category. An individual must be able to convey their emotions and their thoughts in a structured way, as well as being able to absorb their partners’ emotions and thoughts.

Communication is certainly not a one-way street; the emotional phone-lines must flow both ways. One major aspect of being an intellectual communicator is knowing when to stop talking and to start listening. The glorious art form of listening is one that takes more than eighty lifetimes to master, if even then. Though listening spans far beyond spoken words, many individuals communicate via non-verbal means. Listening to a person’s silent conversation offers amazing insight into their true feelings and emotions. When we strip away the faÃ?§ade of words, the only thing left is one’s soul, naked and open to the world. This is why our surroundings are utterly consumed with mindless reverberations of pointless conversations and noise. We hide behind the colorless vibrations of meaningless talk in order to cover ourselves from the vulnerable state of silence. It is in silence that we truly find ourselves. It is in the isolation of words and sounds that we must confront the malformation we have allowed to take place in our souls.

Basically it all boils down to relationships fail if the people don’t mesh or aren’t able to work as a team. I find that people don’t communicate enough to eliminate their problems. A variety of people foolishly bet on physical attraction, which doesn’t last or simply looses its flavor like chewing gum. We have accepted the skin-deep standards of finding love as truth, which as twenty-five-cent bubble gum will lose its excitement after the object is chewed on for a concentrated amount of time. It is extremely foolish to base one’s selection of relationships solely on looks and whiteness of teeth. When an individual picks their partner on this superficial level, they are literally choosing to have a short and unproductive relationship with that individual. By christening this thought pattern people are completely ignoring the communication aspect of relationships, at least outside of the bedroom. And lets face it; a mind-blowing orgasm will only sustain one so long before it looses its flavor.

I believe that as a society we have placed this misconception in our minds that the other person in the relationship should complete the individual. We, in turn, place all of our trust in this person to fill a void in our lives, and just perhaps they do temporarily fulfill this emptiness. Then when they don’t meet all of our expectations that we place before them we end up feeling betrayed. While this inclination of fulfillment through another individual sounds appeasing, reality is placing one’s happiness on the shoulders of another human is calamitous. We should not place our contentment in man, because men will fail, and then all we have left is a tattered silhouette of our being.

As Americans we have come to expect immediate and constant gratification. Thus the over-night success of diet pills for those wishing to shed those unwanted pounds without having to deny themselves Little Debbie in her dazzling decadence of sugar and fat. We are easily distracted by the newer and improved versions of everything. With this mindset of constantly rummaging through the world for something seemingly more exceptional, it is impossible for a follower of this mindset to be truly happy in their current relationship.

In this life one of the most overwhelming and toilsome issues we as humans must face is the battle of love. It seems if something that causes us so much pain we wouldn’t want any of it, but the truth is, we function on the hope and promise of finding our true love. This is the driving force behind every late night dinner, and between every awkward goodnight kiss. The hope that the person we are staring at is our soul mate, and the hope that our search is over and we can finally take rest in the arms of our beloved. But the truth is, none of the latter is for certain, and through the pain and heartache of cumbersome trials and tribulations, we continue searching for our love because something is buried deep down inside of us that is calling out to another human’s soul. The question is, how long will it take for our sirens call to be answered?~

Back in my kitchen, eating pounds upon pounds of cookie dough with my sister, I stare into her blood-shot eyes of childhood enchantment dashed to the wind. And I am filled with a form of confounded happiness knowing that even though she is hurting now, she did feel love once. And if for the rest of her life she continues searching and never finds another love, at least she found it once. And it is this momentary prick of love that is imprinted on the individuals’ soul that lasts for a lifetime. Even though our love lives might be doomed from the very beginning due to the sabotaging outside influences that seep into our minds, we realize that without love we are nothing. So I continued eating with my sister, and finally let the pulsating orange glow of the candle take me away – to another jar of cookie dough.