The Greek-Egyptian concept of Ouroboros, the snake that continually eats it’s own tail, is highly applicable to how Love is presented in modern times. Love is seen as an certain and determined event that happens in one’s life if one is to submit to and follow the gender-cultural standards projected onto them at birth and throughout life. Traditionally, in a man’s life Love is seen as an object, a necessary brick- of many -that builds the house of success. Love is seen as something that can be picked up, thrown, sought, and controlled by the Lover. Love is merely an other toy in the toy box that must be maintained by the Lover solely for his amusement, and his alone. Where traditionally, for women, love is seen as the subject of a women’s life. The core that sustains the life that is woven around by it. Love is seen as something that is to be received, judged, and accepted by the Love. In this case, love is in lockstep with life, the quality of which directly depends on the quality of the former. Through media and socialization, love is given a certain methodized structure depending on a simple uncontrollable binary.
We can see this formulaic Love at every corner of the modern world. Love is filtered through an complex process of red flags, expectations, standards, roles, materialism, and comparison that feeds into an underlying structure of what Love must be, and the dictating blueprint of how Love must grow. This viewpoint is incredibly strong and echoey, through instantaneous communication and algorithmic echo chambers, Love is only further stripped of it’s inherent meaning and endlessly dissected for comparison to an existing unrealistic structural model of what Love should be. Nor is this model anything new, I am no expert, but let’s go all the way back to Romeo and Juliet, initially a cautionary story of the drunken dangers of lust, has been ripped out of it’s original context and meaning for the past five hundred years. We have seen the concept of “Love at first sight” emerge from the encounter between Romeo and Juliet, which then inspired media. The best of which served to dramatically focus on the concept of “Love at first sight.” Which fed the next generation of media, ad infinitum. Just like Ouroboros, Love media continually fed off an distorted version of itself that resulted in a wide drift from Love as a real human experience.
The problem now is in a critical inflection point. Before modern technology Love Media could be separated from Love in a simpler and easier way. How could written words or oral stories be indicative of Love as a whole. Yet still, we fell for it, and now the ground is coming closer. In modern times we are constantly exposed to an rapidly evolving and specializing Love Media that is becoming harder and harder to distinguish from actual reality. Television brought about visualization of what Love should look like. Now, with the abundance of social media we are being shown what Love should socially be about, as well as exposure to the good side of love only. For example, only the pretty sides of Love of shown on social media, flooding Valentines’ day gifts, followed by flowers, and the central ring further condition us to what Love should be, an constant sunny day, filled with warm rays of affection. We have seen this new Love Media take root since the 2000s, now I would like you to imagine how distorted Love Media will become in an decade from now, 25 years from now, 50 years from now. Technology is growing at an incredibility accelerated pace, in parallel we are losing touch with the real ground faster and faster. So I wonder, how far gone will Love be in the future? When will Ouroboros become too strong to defeat? Are we already there?
So now what? What even is Love? One of the best descriptions I have heard is that Love is a flower in a garden that must respect from a distance. To impose ourselves upon a flower is to pluck it away from the context that nourishes it, dooming it to wilting and eventual death. To Love is to unimposingly appreciate. Another great one is in compassionate giving. To open the door to Love is to surrender ourselves, our passions, our interests, our vulnerabilities, our strengths, before the Beloved, wholeheartedly, without expecting anything in return. Additionally, the act of compassionate giving in itself is Love in itself, be it in the language you are versed in, or by giving spacetime, giving takes many forms. Lastly, empathy. The Beloved is a flower, born into an unique context, with their own array of petals, scents, thorns, and faults. To Love the Beloved fully is to try to understand and support each aspect of the Beloved, while providing the right nourishment for positive transformation.
Now look, I have said plenty in this long discourse, but there is one more thing I wish to say. On standards and expectations. Love is an vast incomprehensible being, to force constraints onto Love is like cupping your hands to the Ocean and claiming to have swam through it all. We are deeply scared of the unknown, with the sacredness of Love it is only expected that this fear is mapped onto Love. We use all these expectations and standards to create a foxhole of certainty that we use to hide away from pain and the unknown. Because of this, we close ourselves off to the transformative ocean that is Love. How can we ever learn or transform from Love if we think we know it all!? In the words of Mawlana Rumi,
“Your chief task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” The Masnavi.
Go out there and Love.
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