In our quest for love, we put everything that we are on display, hoping that someone will be attracted to the offer and will make us forget the long days of loneliness. How does this quest look like and how can it develop in the future?
When we search for love, what we express is the desire to be desired. We become obsessed with how to become and stay desirable. On the free market of individual desires, I negotiate and renegotiate my value every day. Thus the anxiety: I am good enough to be desired? By how many and for how long?
We accumulate symbols of your desirability: a fit body, money, education.
Which we can explain this by shrugging our shoulders and saying: well, that’s the materialistic age we are living in. But there’s nothing less materialistic and more sentimental than accumulating things in order to make others love us.
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How will this develop in the future?
There are at least two possible scenarios. One in which we can imagine the acceleration and intensification of this process of narcissistic capitalization. To what degree? It depends on the progress of technology and society. There are already people who treat heart break as a disease. According to them, having a fixation on somebody is a waste of time, a waste of your seduction capital. Therefore, we must treat it as a disease from which you can and should be cured. In this case, the final results can only be unbalanced, with winners and losers, the latter being more and more frustrated and lonely.
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The other scenario is to imagine people renouncing the need to be valued. How can we do that? By being aware of our uselessness. We are all useless. This becomes obvious if we realize that for being valued, we need to have value ascribed to us by another. My value is not mine; it is given to me by those who desire me. The general hypocrisy, once realized, can ease our relationships. I want to seem perfect so that the other would love me. And I want the other to be perfect so that by choosing me he will transfer his value upon me. This approach results in everybody being obsessed by performance. That’s why people break up at the sight of the slightest imperfection.
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But there’s an antidote to this madness: love as tenderness. Real tenderness means accepting the weaknesses of the other. There’s a lot of joy in laughing at yourself in the presence of the loved one. To know that you can be whatever you chose or manage to be and still have somebody there to laugh with you.
Please share this and shape the future of love!
