We build ourselves gilded cages made of shiny baubles and possessions, which substitute a warm touch. The love we wish to receive from others can be directly measured in shopping sprees and grand declarations of self love.
And yet as much as we try to adorn ourselves in pretty dresses and fine jewels it is only a mark of the emptiness inside. Every penny spent shows the number of hugs and smiles we wished we got from the people we care about, sprinkled with misdirected promises of the life we wish we lived, but can only see in movies and read in books, whose characters stand for the idealised standards real humans will never measure up to.
The romantics among us will spend lifetimes trying to become those dramatic heroes, who show up with flowers and boomboxes under someone's window, only to discover someone else inside that room with the object of our affection, treating them worse than we ever would. They will proceed to spend countless hours asking the bottoms of a series of craft ales 'what went wrong' and 'when will it be our turn to be the person inside that room'.
The cynics will sneer and reaffirm that true love is a construct, only a few hundred years old, marriage was never anything more than a glorified business deal and negotiating how many goats your child is worth before passing the responsibility of feeding them to somebody else was as honest as the whole ordeal could ever be.
Kind souls will vacillate between platitudes on the existence of soul mates and how out of seven billion people on this planet it is certain there is a match for everyone somewhere out there, before they lose every debate and admit the fact that most people eventually just reach an age of compromise guided by their own biological clocks and an innate drive to pass their genes on like some mindless disease.
None of them will stop to consider that they have nothing particularly worth departing to future generations, outside an insignificant name and DNA proof of generations of people, who unavailingly tried to stop the world from forgetting them. Did those people ever sit and ponder the futility of romantic endeavours or were they too preoccupied with the real struggle of putting food on the table?
In a world where the traditional idea of family is not needed for survival, we seem to be overly obsessed with the meaning of love, in a considerable attempt to avoid looking at sex as a basic need just like food, and companionship as a separate but equally important need, which is not necessarily covered by the sexual partner.
Interestingly enough, most of these debates end with a married person eventually losing their patience, standing up and shouting at someone's face that 'they have no idea what they are talking about' and 'it will all make sense once they meet the one'. Their attempt to convince that person their feelings are not valid, as well as themselves that they have not created a life based on societal norms they never considered to question, usually concludes in all concerned parties silently agreeing never to discuss the matter again.
None of the people involved stop to think that maybe there is no correct answer, nor should there be. It is possible that some people simply evolved to be more sensitive to certain feelings, while others place a higher value on their ability to win every debate, even if the price is being alone for it.
If life calls for questioning everything, then we should also question the motives of those assuming the role of the philosopher in Plato's Cave. Knowing the truth and being happy might not always come hand in hand and breaking the chains of the prisoners who have only seen the shadows of life is not necessarily a noble endeavour. It is just as likely that the philosophers yearn for someone to be just as jaded as they are, so they can somehow bear their own lonely existence. Having seen The Matrix would you choose to know the truth or have a happy life inside it?
In the spirit of a life constantly flooded with uncertainty, humans have a tremendous ability to keep giving people chances, because 'what if there is a one'? Are they not worth finding?
Maybe.
But depending on your role on that window scene and the others' position on settling, you might be the one standing outside, watching the person you would give your life for holding someone else, just because they want to find out what else is out there. And at that point you change sides from a romantic to a cynic, wishing you could just exchange a few goats for the person you want and be done with it.
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