Love is a many confusing thing.
I am not sure if you've ever experienced this before, and I am not sure I have the eloquence to put it into words.
You are walking into a party, a church, a social gathering. Someone, for whatever reason, catches your eye. And you quickly make up your mind about the person - what we call the first impression.
From that first impression, you either i) lose all interest and carry on in superficial conversation or ii) fall in love with the image of the person (ie. what you think he's like, what you think she likes) and then write the fairytale story in your head which ends up with you marrying him or her and loving each other into your sweet golden years.
And, unexpectedly, the other person is interested in you as well, they start speaking to you, and for some inexplicable reason, you suddenly revert from ii) to i). They are downgraded from 'my personal Latin lover' to 'Let's just be friends' or 'Should I fake a seizure just to get out of this conversation?'.
It's as if we've permeated a bubble of mystery or the destroyed the fairytale we've built in our heads about the other person, and everything falls to pieces.
I thought that this experience proved that I was some kind of a b______ (it rhymes with custard), but I have been reading this wonderful book by psychologist writer Alain de Botton called 'Essays in Love' (thanks, Krys!) who tries to put meaning to our rejection of people who like us.
His explanation is as follows:
We don't like ourselves, or we see flaws in ourselves.
We see someone who we do like, who in our minds they are flawless.
The person likes us for who we are, but we struggle to understand it because we don't like ourselves, so there must be something wrong with that person for liking us.
We behave in a way to push them away or reject them. We lose interest.
This is a Marxist theory (Groucho, surprisingly, not Karl) who once famously said - "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members. "
Innately, we don't accept ourselves, so we find it strange when we find someone who accepts us, and consequently reject them (in essence, rejecting ourselves).
When we look at some (an angel) from a position of unrequited love and imagine the pleasures that being in heaven with them might bring us, we are prone to overlook a significant danger: how soon their attractions might pale if they begun to love us back.
We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt.
But what if such a being were one day to turn around and love us back? We can only be shocked. How could they be divine as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?
If in order to love, we must believe that the beloved surpasses us in some way, does not a cruel paradox emerge when we witness this love returned? "If s/he really is so wonderful, how could s/he love someone like me?"- alain de botton, essays in love.
If you understood this, then congratulations. You are a Marxist.
If this is confusing you, then congratulations as well. Maybe love doesn't have to be so complicated.
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