A few weeks ago a friend approached me suggesting that the Voice write an editorial about love, based on an idea she got from a New York Times competition in that same vein.
I was skeptical at first. Having been “going steady,” as my mom likes to call it, with a guy for a number of months, I’ve started to forget what being single is really like. But I cast my mind back to last year — my freshman year — and started to recall memories which make me confident in saying that it really is a jungle or a feeding frenzy out there. The common phrase is that there are many “fish in the sea” for a reason. If love was easy, we would be finding our fish in a bucket.
Now, I am not a philosophy major, so don’t expect anything too profound. What I do know is that the concept of love has such an enormous stigma around it that I hardly know where to begin. It is a word that is applied too liberally in many instances. People say it to friends, pets, even about their teachers. The girls in my sorority alone toss the word around often enough to make it our new motto.
I used to be in the camp that thought this was a bad thing. Love, for me, is reserved for my family and the occasional high school boyfriend who confessed it to me and therefore guilted me into saying it back. And if a friend says it to you, they’re obviously exaggerating, or have an agenda, or just don’t know the true meaning of love, right?
Maybe not. I’ve had a change of heart. Love can be more widely applied. I do love my dog. I’ll cry when she dies and she makes me happy every day. I love my friends too. But I still don’t feel right somehow telling them that I love them all the time. And this is why, after talking to two of my closest friends on the subject, we’ve concluded that not only are there varying degrees of love, there are also different types of love. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll call them object love, friend love and family love.
They don’t require much clarification. Object love is what you feel about your bed after a long day, or the sweater that makes you feel sexy the instant you put it on. Family love can be applied to a select few — your immediate family, obviously, and those particularly close friends who you feel totally comfortable around and would do anything for. And friend love is for everyone else, including your teachers, old friends from home whom you occasionally talk to and the majority of friends you have at Wooster.
These will obviously change from person to person, since one of the other confusing things about love is that everyone views it a little differently. I have friends who “fall in love” with every person they date, then suddenly hate them after they break up. Curiously, most of these friends are girls. Alternately, I have friends who believe themselves incapable of ever falling in love, or shy away from relationships when they feel they’re reaching the point of “love.” And most of them are guys.
Which brings me to another point. To be blunt, guys are essentially discouraged from being in love. Even today, when we, as college students, are basically considered adults, everyone is skeptical of couples who are “in love” and plan to stay together indefinitely. This in itself makes sense, since statistically very few people really stay together to the end. And yet it’s still different with guys.
Chances are, while the girlfriend will be congratulated for finding someone so perfect for her, the guy may be questioned or even looked down upon for “settling down.” The word “settle” itself can imply either stopping normal activity to become domestic — i.e. settling down — or to settle for something. Neither term is particularly complimentary.
In no way am I implying that guys cannot experience love in the same way as girls — they are every bit as capable. However, I believe they experience many more obstacles along the way and must overcome a lot to reach that stage.
Furthermore, the obstacles guys overcome and the general feeling towards monogamous relationships may also be a factor that perpetuates the idea that sleeping around is acceptable, and even admirable. The overused double standard is just as present today as it was 50 years ago, or even more so. Guys are looked up to for canoodling with multiple women — hey, the more the merrier — but if a girl hooks up with a few guys her reputation plummets directly down the drain.
I still don’t understand why this is. Guys are just as likely to contract STDs as girls. And it’s just as much the guys fault if his partner gets pregnant; though one could argue that the girl ends up dealing with the repercussions much more frequently than the guy.
What it comes down to is that there are deep-rooted, unshakeable prejudices in our society. We believe that humans aren’t meant to be monogamous, that guys have more “needs” than women and that guys having sex is cool but girls having sex is slutty.
And even if we managed to dissolve these ideas, we would still be left with the problem that everyone views and experiences love a little differently.
You can’t expect your significant other to fall in love with you precisely when you discover yourself in love with him or her. And even if you think that someone is perfect for you, that doesn’t necessarily mean you are perfect for them too. Sometimes love sucks, but then again, that’s life.