Love Does Live Three Years... And That's Good News

In a culture saturated with romantic comedies and coming-of-age stories that inevitably include some sort of love interest, it is easy to get your expectations built up.

When I had to come up with my life’s goal to write my admission essay, it was rather difficult, because I had few ambitions that look good on college application forms and personal statements. I was an accomplished high-school student with damn good scores and a perfect record, but there was no burning passion in me to change the world, become a war journalist, or cure all diseases.

All I wanted from my future was happiness, plain and simple. I wanted to live a happy life—and in my dreams, I imagined it shared with a special someone who would make my heart somersault each time I’d look in his eyes (romance novels might have done some damage here, I confess).

In short, falling in love was my life goal

It may sound funny, but I had two excuses. First, I was seventeen. Second, I had never been in love before. That’s quite a burden for a 17 year old. All my crushes to the date had been fictional characters, and to be honest, I already started worrying if everything was alright with me.

You can imagine the expectations and hopes I’d built up for college in that particular respect. College was THE place to you find your soul mates (at least in YA fiction and movies it was). Soooo…

Unfortunately, college didn’t live up to the buzz. Friendships—yes. All-nighters and library hours—yes. Crazy dorm neighbors and pranks—yes. But no romance.

By the time I graduated I was educated, exhausted, disappointed, and depressed. I felt cheated. Just when I was preparing for a life-long career of a sad single aunt, it happened.

I fell in love

It wasn’t at all what I expected. Maybe it was my habit to overanalyze things, but it made me miserable. I felt anxious. Overpowered. Obsessed. I lost appetite. All I could think about was when we shall meet again. I was lovesick.

Despite what you might have assumed, my feelings were reciprocated, and my boyfriend wasn’t an abusive jerk or anything like that. I should have been walking on the air with butterflies fluttering in my stomach and my head in the clouds, and suchlike.

Yet I wasn’t. My friends were very supportive, yet they didn’t understand my reaction. “So, what it’s like to be finally in love? Are you happy? You must feel at least… elated?”

The problem was that my sense didn’t drown in pink clouds of infatuation. It was there all the time. And it sensed that something was not right.

There was I, an intelligent being, capable of reasoning. And there was it: the “in-love-ness.” Something that made me act stupid. In-love-ness made me lose sleep. It made me jealous, whereas my better judgment said that there is no call for that.

The “in-love-ness” screamed inside of me about all the things he ought to do if he “really loves me” (crazy things, like “Would you cut all your friends out of your life if I asked you to?”) The sound mind inside my head said that it’s unreasonable, that it was unfair to him. The in-love-ness shouted “Shut up! I know better.”

It was an agonizing struggle that lasted for three years. And when it all started to wane away, I felt good. It felt like recovery from an illness.

I fell out of love

Yet I loved, nevertheless.

Now I must apologise for the somewhat clickbaity title. Love is everything you’ve heard about. It’s that pesky “in-love-ness” that only lives three years, and then recedes gradually in the dark corners of the primeval brain structures from where it crawled out.

I went on loving freely, instead of following the strings that my limbic system was pulling so painfully.

That’s because in-love-ness happens when nature pulls us like dolls, bangs our heads together, and says “Now kiss!” Love is taking a moment to see the beauty of another human being before us.

Unlike “in-love-ness,” love is a choice. It is a commitment. It is something we re-affirm every day. It doesn’t happen to us. We make it so. It doesn’t make us blind to the flaws of our loved one. It starts when we choose to embrace them. It’s lasting.

The funny thing is, those two can happen in any order. They can get entangled and complicated, and drive us over the edge. They can layer one on top of the other in a perfect harmony making up the “honeymoon phase”.

Yet I do believe that we must learn to distinguish between the two while still appreciating the value of both. Not pit one against the other like many articles on the internet do (AKA “in-love” is ultimately egotistic and bad, “true love” is selfless and good). They are both about two people, and they are both quite real. Yet they come from very different places, and finding a balance between them is one of the most challenging tasks humans face.