Are You Looking For Love Or Anesthesia?

If you’re not in love, maybe one of your dreams is to get into this state and enjoy everything that a relationship can bring you. It’s a very common desire. Indeed, romantic love is said to be the only great utopia in postmodernity. It is also said that it has become a kind of collective anesthesia that, in many cases, turns out to be disappointing. Are you looking for love or anesthesia?

There are those who go further. They point out that this desire to find love is not really born of an intrinsic need, but is the result of the skillful manipulation of “an industry of affections”. In this way, it would be a kind of “domestication” that seeks to reduce your emotional world to a single plane: romantic love.

That’s why there are hundreds of messages that subtly announce an idea: falling in love is achieving a remedy for all ills. Furthermore, they convey to us the idea that our life project will not be complete until we find the “love of our lives”. Furthermore, this love is supposed to make us much stronger emotionally.

At this point, we can ask ourselves a question: are we looking for true love or do we want to fill our existential void with a romantic ideal?

The desire to fall in love: love or anesthesia?

Many people have developed a great appetite for intense emotions.  In this way, they assume that feeling in excess is also “feeling alive”. This need for intense emotions is most present in those who experience their current life as tedious and meaningless.

The tricky thing about all this is that all these intense experiences are, by their very nature, transient. And it couldn’t be otherwise. If they were repeated too often or lasted longer than necessary, they would gradually lose their exciting and intense character.

Therefore, all these experiences are destined to be volatile. They make you live a moment with great intensity, but at the same time they are of short duration. Many people want love like that: blind and brutal. They believe it will last for a long time.

Because of their expectations, they are easily and very intensely disappointed. In such cases, we can ask: are you looking for love or anesthesia?

one selfishness for two

The origin of these frustrating misunderstandings lies precisely in the strong distortion suffered by the concept of romantic love in our times. Many people don’t know how to solve the problems they encounter in their life and look for a veil of hope in romantic love.

Almost everyone has big plans for themselves, often associated with success in the eyes of others. Within this logic, the partner becomes someone who facilitates or complements these goals. That is, a piece that fits into this narcissistic puzzle. Reducing life to this idea often creates a feeling of existential emptiness: an icy cold that gets stronger whenever reality doesn’t match your scheme.

Those who think this way avoid two ideas. The first is to understand that there are ideals and values ​​that go far beyond social success. The second is that a healthy and normal life includes boredom, monotony, frustrations and sadness at various times and under different circumstances.

love doesn’t complete us

When it is said, romantically, that love is everything and that it is the essence of life, no one is lying. What we sometimes forget is that this statement refers not only to couple love, but to the multiple dimensions of love:  self-love, love for work, for humanity or their ideals.

Falling in love is not an experience you can only live as a couple. Couples’ love relationships are just a small part of this huge constellation of love. And, we can say, not necessarily the most complete expression of that love with capital letters that we so idealized.

In any case, the most important thing is to understand that love does not nullify or eliminate other aspects of life. Contradiction, emptiness and boredom are not automatically eliminated ‘by the work and grace of love’. In fact, it is in these difficult realities that a real affection manages to take root and take root.

Love for yourself and others does not lead you to paradise, but to a deeper and more transcendental human reality.