Why Does ‘Love’ Seem To Be The Hardest Word?

Don’t get me wrong, we use the word ‘love’ a lot, we #LOVE everything – the shoes of a girl passing us on the street, a stranger’s dog that we are probably too scared to pet, a sweaty yoga session, the mesmerising randomness of a tilted tree dropping into the sunset, the cohesiveness of a beautifully put together cheese platter, every cute baby who does the bare minimum of smiling, friends that we only profess fondness for on social media (mainly on their birthdays, let’s be honest), the preciseness of a cat walking around a floor filled with paper cups… in the universe of instant Instagram captions and comments we seem to love it all. But the only love we are really scared of is love itself. The one that really opens us up to vulnerability.

Oh the horror of accidentally playing a song with love in its title or uttering the L word in a conversation with someone you have just started seeing, how could you possibly do that? “I love your eyes,” he said, promptly correcting it to – “I mean, I really like your eyes, they look so big because your face is so small.” Jesus!

It’s as if simply using or hearing the word ties us to some kind of commitment, and we all know how much we hate commitment, it’s the absolute antichrist of our sequestered generation that often mistakes the need for attention for the want of stability. We seek aggressively and dismiss just as quickly.

It’s a miracle that ‘love at first sight’ hasn’t been re-termed a less threatening ‘like at first sight.’ I wonder how many months of bread-crumbing, non-exclusive dates it take to realise that it was indeed love at first sight? But then what? We walk into the sunset of lonely boulevard because we decided to let it go because we didn’t like how they tucked their T-shirt into their jeans, or didn’t like their eggs runny or didn’t use apostrophes correctly? Expectations now cause resentment, discussions are deemed confrontations and having needs labels you needy. But hell we expect respect, communication and honesty at work and in friendships.

How do we expect dating to be any different from the other areas of our life? We switch jobs and careers frequently (not ignoring the the political and economics aspect of this), we shop for clothes with an expiry date in mind, we watch 5 shows and 3 movies across 3 or more platforms. So we also swipe-meet-flirt-freakout-repeat.

The freedom of online dating is weirdly exhilarating. So in the name of protecting ourselves, the love we show for the new unattainable bag or Daniel Roseberry’s new collection for Schiaparelli, or the new vegan café in the hood is far more enthusiastic than for the person we want to seek out romantically. After all, the bag or the cafe is not going to complain to us about us working too much or being emotionally unavailable.

On a completely unrelated note, do you think more and more people get cats today because for once we are not judged for having someone in our life who doesn’t love us the way we love them? Or at all! Asking for a friend who’s about to get one.

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