Cynicism: the love pandemic.

I am weary how our conversations about love in pop culture usually seek to answer the question: "How has she/he/they benefited me?" Love is reduced to how handsome, rich, intelligent, capable, funny, and caring someone else is. If we ever found a person who fits our consumption criterias, we may think it's love and our language then switches to one of ownership.

⚡️⬇ The diagnosis?

I saw how this cynical, self-centered mindset harbored in my own heart. So often my first response was to flee a relationship when it started to pain. One entry in my diary wrote: "Is it love or is it self-preservation? What is love when I demand only perfection and goodness? I make no space for sufferings and weaknesses, leaving them the moment they burden me. Then, where is love?"

In When All You Have Ever Wanted Isn't Enough, Harold Kushner expressed this concern:

"I am afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person, because they will have seen how much it hurts to take the risk of loving and have it not work out. I am afraid that they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment. They will be so fearful of the pain of disappointment that they will forgo the possibilities of love and joy."

bell hooks concluded in All About Love: "Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart."

♡⬇ The proposed cure?

(1: To oneself.) To truly love, we are in the desperate need to first stop hurting ourselves, starting from the basics: Are we kind and encouraging to ourselves? Can we let go of guilt and validate our needs? Are we showing up for ourselves and doing what our heart, mind, and body need? Are we taking care of ourselves with wholesome foods, adequate exercise, abundant self-love and autonomy? Are we living in a way that wouldn't betray our integrity?

"Stop hurting those who are trying to love you, including yourself. Let go of doubt and self-betrayal. Don't belittle your own worth and arrest your own light." I wrote in the same diary entry.

(2: To one's community.) To truly love, we cannot leave our understanding on love to the hands of commerce and big media that are constructed by male fantasies. We need pioneers who bravely discuss about love in our public and private lives, who practice love daily and diligently, who rigorously engage in the metaphysical undertakings of love, who is intellectually and spiritually passionate to explore its true shape and challenge the status quo.

The cure to the pandemic of Cynicism About Love is a continual conviction to choose love and profess love well.