How we fall in love with a lie
The person you fell in love with, do they ever exist to begin with?
Imaginary lovers never disagree
They always care
They’re always there when
You need satisfaction guaranteed
- Atlanta Rhythm Section, Imaginary Lover
We are a generation that lived inside a framed reality, exhibiting skeptical behavior towards bazillion facts revolving around out there. We constantly read sweet messages and uplifting words on our phone, inflating our ego and sense of righteousness. This is the reality of a postmodernist world with all the lightning speed advancement of technology that does not really followed by the maturity of our cultural evolution.
Though this is not exclusively happened within our generation, yet the impact seems really obvious with the advanced technological generation that become more of a “digital native”. Living in a world with many one and zero that formed into multidimensional amazing things that we can’t begin to comprehend. Thus, our imagination is the limit on how far could we go.
Nowadays the advancement of technology that creates multitude of AIs on various applications really helps our life. Starting from industrial level utility and missile guides into psychological treatment towards those who are too afraid to talk with an actual person. This machine that learns our behavior exhibit more and more of amazing stuff each time they learn something new.
Let’s turn the dial a bit into the past, when it was the first time internet start to take hold. It was IRCs that became sort of our first social media services, we could communicate with people so far away from us by some simple clicks. The word they typed feels like genuine and it seems like the barrier were never there to begin with. I mean, even one of my colleague met his destined one from this media, which they surprisingly became a pretty harmonious nowadays. Life could get very unpredictable sometimes.
Turn the dial a bit more, when it was the age of telegrams and cables running above our heads was still a thing. The black smoke of industrial machinery was a daily occurrence that paint the sky in a strange orangish yellow of melancholy days we have to get through. Then the mailman came on our front porch, telling that they brought us some telegram from our darling in a faraway place. Then we cried because it seems that the war could prevent us to saw him for another couple of months because the campaign does not get any better. He might just died with some stray bullets that coincidentally runs towards his skull or between his ribs that would fatally knock him off.
Then we turn the dial to the age of letters, when it was still a thing to wait for a messenger knocking from our door. They gave us this sealed letter that said his family does not approve their marriage because of political reason, yet he is going to push forward with their bond, whatever the cost may be. The very staple of a romance drama that would be a great hit on some hundred years later on.
Turn the dial to the past some more again, and we will see this pattern perpetuated. The nature of us human society that obtain this ability called imagination really helps us to think of a complicated concept that other animals might be incapable of doing. As what Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his book, the invention of fiction has made us human progressed to became such an advanced society because it is not only enable us to imagine things but doing so collectively. With that power, we had evolved the homo sapiens species into quite some political creature that we are.
The person you fell in love with never existed. They created their persona just for you. They saw how wonderful you were and copied your characteristics. They pretended to like the things you liked so they would be more believable to you. They knew you were smart and wouldn’t want them if they portrayed their true nature. They made you believe they were madly in love with you. They made you believe you were the center of the universe then they stopped playing. They knew they had caught you in a trap. They knew you would kill yourself trying to get back the person you fell in love with. They didn’t care, they never cared, it was never about you. They will never manage to do that, it is not in their nature. They treat everyone this way. You weren’t the first and you won’t be their last.
- Author Unknown
People would do anything to satisfy their ego, humans are capable of being this manipulative towards others. It was the manipulative narrative of a certain tribe leader back then so they would invigorate their fellow tribe members to then go to war with the neighboring village. They would gave the thought some effort, and when the time comes they’d believe it wholeheartedly and die for it. History has proven this concept true each time, and it will always be perpetuated.
In the less serious narrative of how manipulation could be the driving point of things, humans could falling in love sight unseen oftentimes through written word or hearsays. This has happened for many centuries, and “The Web” has only made it easier and foster that feeling of a relationship and helping those with similar internet to come together before meeting in real life. As said by Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, “Online technology, as well as SMS, enables having a connection that is faster and more direct, It also enables ongoing dialogue as compared to the slow interactions that are typical of letters.”
The way attraction in the sense of love works on human is always a strange thing to grasp, they are a mystery and yet occur so common on human society. Some said that it was a biproduct of hormonal interactions that happened due to the way human evolved. Others said that is a sacred thing blessed and gifted by God in order to unify human under His kingdom come. Yet all of that has one point, that is to create stability on our human society in order to fulfill the collective needs that appears every now and then.
This is the fact that often forgotten by the masses about the ridiculous concept of romantic love that the marketing industry kept on perpetuating to sell their products. They kept feeding us on our tendency to attach ourselves with this wild imagination on our head, selling cheesy songs and irrational amount of loyalty and affection. That makes us fall in love and commit our relationship with people who is not only bad for us, but also for themselves too. That is why there are breakups and accidental marriages (most often happen on eastern countries) that happened after valentine days.
Romantic love sucks, not only because we fall for what deceive our eyes but also because it often betray our expectations. We fall to a concept of someone we are so enchanted with, unknowingly that they are not what we imagine they would be. We want someone that is on our mind, thus why we might feel so yesterday but then change our mind by now. We are human, just like that we can want one thing now but then want something entirely different some minutes after, self-centric and egoistical creature.
Romantic love might make you unable to forget this person for so long that it’d literally take you ten years to move on. Because you still want this person that is frozen in time with their perfection, but then time keep moving on so they might not be who they were by now. Then you move on, probably to another source of oxycontin that you found recently, because you have this needs to ensure your emotional stability. It is highly impractical, and might be impairing sometimes.
Yet that does not mean it is entirely useless, sometimes that tendency is what makes this life to be a better place. Though with all kink and quirks, this romantic love might make this mundane and ever-practical world more bearable. We can at least feel better when we have this idolized figure that will save our soul one day, that dream will keep us going.
Therefore, I won’t say that romantic love like those drama serials portrays are entirely nonsense (though most of them certainly do). It is just sometimes, most of them are us being misguided by our expectations that makes it looks better than it actually is. The grass on the other side will always be greener anyways, and so does the person in our dream.
Bibliography
Ehrlich, Brenna, 2013, “ Why it’s really possible to fall in love online”, CNN, accessed from https://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/14/tech/social-media/online-love/index.html.
Harari, Yuval Noah, 2015, Sapiens : a Brief History of Humankind. New York :Harper.
Manson, Mark, “A Brief History of Romantic Love and Why It Kind of Sucks”, accessed from https://markmanson.net/romantic-love#footnote-1.
