I Need to Believe

How did our great grandparents, grandparents, and in some cases, our parents manage to make love work? The smorgasbord of potential mates is dizzying and with the advent of internet dating and speed dating random pairings occur all day, every day, all over the world. Where does a person find balance amongst all this madness? The beautiful illusion of "true love" is sold to each person through the media and enforced by our interactions with others in the societal traditions we uphold. But, now our twenty-something generation holds the pain from generations past, plus carries the weight of being unable to conform to the coupledom thrust upon us. Can we take the out-dated prehistoric concepts involving relationships and apply it to an entirely different world? The problem our generation grapples with is our inability to integrate our partnerships with our individualism. We have all the parts of the puzzle in front of us, but we cannot put it together. We are unable to assimilate the previous generational experience into our experience. Love does not operate in a vacuum. We need cohesion between our inner lives and our outer world. If we are in a committed relationship, we need support and interaction with the rest of society. While this is all well and good as far as the community is concerned, we are also bombarded with conflicting messages about what finding a "soul mate" really means. We forget that once we find our "soul mate", we still have to live with them everyday. Do we do this from a place of necessity, obsession, or a truly elevated spiritual love- and what exactly IS that?

We need to believe in love, THAT IS WHY WE DON'T FALL IN LOVE. The harshness of reality will eventually visit each one of our relationships. Its impending doom hovers above the echo of our laughter. It must be dealt with. At some point, we will face one another's monsters, and if we don't turn and run the other way then we have succeed. But we hide our humanness in the shuffling of our feet, moving from this person to that person, trying to hide our boredom with ourselves. Even so, we end up repeating the same conversation with different people. Do we fully engage ourselves long enough for the illusion to pass and then start over again? Is that what love is supposed to be? And maybe there is a definitive line between what's real and not real, but those special cases give us headaches. We live with the tension of knowing what we've lost and what everyone else around us has lost too. It's true, the experience of being human has made us all experts in accepting our losses, but at a certain point, shouldn't we get to reach out our hand and touch the dream? One could build a lifetime on that hope, isolating themselves from the demands of a real commitment. And it's the demands pushing us into another dark corner that makes us ask strangers for answers to our impossible questions.