Romance = Supply & DemandING

If love is so great, why do people in relationships seek escape and reversion to being single?! EXACTLY!

Love [romance] is like math. Either you're good at it or not. Maybe love is not for you. The overstatement, overexaggeration, overtitillation, overemphasis on love makes it overwhelming necessary to find a perfect partner.

No matter how we envisage courting love, we are concretized by the status quo of what a perfect ideal partner should be. Because we need to have a fixed criteria in order to start looking. We must have standards under the disguise of preferences, otherwise we can fall in love with ANYONE.

Keep in mind that we judge vis a vis something else. We make a judgment by comparing someone to someone else. This immediate, unconscious act of assuming is extremely biased and unforgiving to the identity theory. You assume that this person has an essence incapable of changing.

We quell our inner disagreements under the guise of compliments such as "Good for you", "Congratulations", "Such a cute couple!" We render the couple cute and unique in their own way [because we really can't see how they are cute at all], in their own right.

To be with you, I am something. To be without you, I am nothing.

Anything less is undeserving and unworthy because commercialization breeds us to deserve only the best when the best is somewhere out there, attainable and yet unattainable.

The very intimate reason to acquire a partner could be to conform. This is similar to owning merchandise and being part of a fad. Acquiring ersatz Longchamp bags and sparkling Gucci.

Unfortunately romance does not thrive in a vacuum. There are manifold sources of frustration that plague the stability of a relationship, threatening to tear it asunder or to enmesh it into oblivion

Perhaps we are too in tune with status quo which glamorizes the need to get married, squander all our money on the honeymoon, and months later, wait on line for food stamps and EBT.

First off, I would like to say that I am partly cynical for writing an essay on love and its conundrum, a fork in the road presenting a divide between meaningful love and discounted love in an era of postmodernity and McDonaldization. I partly denounce all the couples in the world who are successful with their relationships while I lightly feign happiness for them. However, I am a firm believer that love exists only if it is manufactured by a receiving party. Love is possible if both partners expose the the gold and sludge to each other.

Romance causes demand. When you recite the line, "There are plenty of fish in the sea," you have inserted the idea that love and romance can be commercialized and subject to supply and demand. There is nothing less of finding an ideal partner on matchmaking websites that generate matches via profile creation. These websites market women as merchandise and the same goes for men. This is all great because it seems as if everyone knows what they want when they enter on a profile picture, mechanically aligning themselves to certain identities and identifying with certain categories. This template is used to pseudo-appropriate persons and once again, manufacture their characteristics for them, and market them as merchandise. You may customize and upgrade by changing your expectations in your partner. You have standards, the machine will listen and abide by your need to answer your choices. It seems that persons know what they want on the basis of what they affix on their profiles. But do they really know what they want, and are their intentions reciprocated by their future partner?

Does romance satiate the need for loneliness? Does loneliness generate a panoply of reasons to pair up with a "boyfriend" or "girlfriend"? What exactly is this daunting, discomforting loneliness that we personify in order to avoid battling it on our own? I can explain that there are stereotypical notions of love where "the one" is in store for us, lying dormant, awaiting our wide-eyed search or unexpected love at first sights. Or love could be on first come first serve basis. No matter how we envisage meeting love, we are concretized by the status quo of what a perfect ideal partner should be. Let me adjust the light to why these are normative statements rather than descriptive, analytical crosshairs. These are prescriptive statements that edge us towards what is "appropriate" and normal. In Chinese laxative, "dai jung fah" means going with the crowd and doing what most people are doing. "Most people" indicate the loss of self and little room for individual error because the aura of the entire mass/crowd outweighs individual's visibility. In order to remove ourselves from deviation and from being questioned about our future partners, we seek the ideal partner that media perpetrates. Convinced, devoted fans of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette accept the tall, dark, and handsome criteria while others in less rigid primetime light grimace at these tv shows and pluck their own path, maybe even a garden path.

Suppose that I date someone who is incredibly thin, underweight, increasingly unhealthy, and extremely incompetent. The immediate reaction would be less than subtle. Certainly, even the terms that I put forth are enough to turn stomachs. But why should stomachs turn? Why is it necessary to squirm and feel as if this is an inappropriate partner for someone who is thought to "deserve more" or "deserve better"? I have evaluated most of my friends and when I size up their girlfriend/boyfriend, I can't help but sneer and claim that my friends deserve better. But this statement flaws at its very sinews. Keep in mind that we judge vis a vis something. We make a judgment by comparing someone to someone else. Therefore we compare the partner to a grand purported ideal partner. Upon immediate categorization and differentiation, similar to Othering, this partner is casted as either acceptable or unacceptable. We distill our inner mumbles under the guise of compliments such as "Good for you", "Congratulations", "Such a cute couple!" We render the couple cute and unique in their own standing, in their own right. We do this in order to box them in and classify them as a couple whose love is unique, notwithstanding critique. We have shallow hopes that they will flourish and be the best couple and be married as time goes on. We assume their relationship perfect because it has nothing to do with us. Their relationship does not entail us and it does not depend on us, therefore we give them specialty nonetheless.

What does it matter to us? Oh it matters to the one who claims, "You deserve better." It matters to them because they have asserted some kind of dominance over their friend. Person A claims that B should detach from Boyfriend B because there is a nice Boyfriend C out there that they just met last night. Person A conveys the same amount of energy a parent does in swaying the romance A has met. There is a controlled effect here where B feels that it is A's best wishes to wish his current relationship undone. But it is not in the best interest of B because in reality, A and B are not really that close. In moments like these, best interest arguments become exposed as one friend might think they know another better than the other knows themself. This is the root of a dominated friendship where one person assumes a greater power and exerts a greater influence over another person. By virtue of the title "best friend," they abuse the right to their friendship and instead, politicize the friendship as if it was an owner and a pet. Therefore it matters to the dominating friend who his dominated friend goes out with. It matters to him because he impresses upon his friend his ideals and his standards when in reality, he is not the one who is seeking love from his friend's partner. This could be the situation though, that he is romantically involved with his friend's partner, but that is a case of living vicariously through his friend.

We should learn to respect our friend's relationships regardless of their preferences and their seeming mismatch in partners. By respecting their choices, we are respecting them for their wholeness. By accepting their interests and outlandish criteria for partners, we should be reminded that not only do opposites attract, but also, people complement one another in idiosyncratic ways. What may be strange to one person is simply unique and marvelous to another. You can judge a morbidly obese, incredibly old partner because this is uncanny to the status quo, but you may not denounce the relationship as faulty or less. It is by habit that we come to agree and disagree. Philosopher David Hume makes it clear that habit is why we think "the future resembles the past." It is by habit that we accept social norms. Bourdieu states that fashion standards reproduces the status quo and it reproduces a certain look ingrained in our minds of what an ideal mate should resemble. When we jazz through pages of a magazine it is not invisible to our eye the models that deliver striking facial features, defined jawlines, exact, immaculate "beauty" served on a page. The perfect package is implicated on the page and now you have to emulate this perfection. By beautifying yourself, you can also be "on the cover of a magazine." You can be more than presentable, you can achieve star power and glamour. Therefore when we judge persons, we judge them according to these flashbulb images of models and "real" men and women. Anything less is undeserving and unworthy because commercialization breeds us to deserve only the best when the best is somewhere out there, attainable and yet unattainable.

Back to loneliness. Loneliness is a reason for partnering up. It is an absolutely selfish reason to partner up because it demands the other partner to forge a relationship in order to satisfy a receiving person. If the other person is lonely too, it takes two to play the game, and misery loves company. This is difficult to argue because two persons can reciprocate their neediness and form a rather tight, tearful relationship where dependency envelopes them. This may not be the best relationship because it is self-destructive, but this type of relationship can form the very basis of "love" and its redefinitions. Loneliness is a void which needs to be filled under the impression that finding an ideal soulmate or finding a partner can quench the loneliness. This is all but fantasy. Loneliness can easily give way to boredom. Schopanhauer's theory of boredom reveals our depths and desires to live. Boredom can not be fixed by acquiring a partner. When you quench loneliness and boredom by finding a partner, you can removing the weight of a relationship. You can asking for responsibility which is the very responsibility to keep me entertained and keep me from feeling lonely. Always keep me tethered, keep me under your possession. Because by being tethered, I am secure and safe from the nothingness that exists outside of our relationship which in turn, gives me meaning and existence.

In existentialist theory, Erich Fromm states that the" escape from freedom" ends when two persons enter a relationship and battle its undulating currents. They feel safer and "loved" because they do not have to experience a world of nothingness outside of their relationship. They are given a title by their boyfriend/girlfriend and they are given a schedule of tasks. In simple machinated language, "I love you" provides the same level of security and confiding which protects the persons completely and keeps them free from nothingness. To be with you, I am something. To be without you, I am nothing. To face the world on my own [loneliness] is to face anomie and be reduced to nothing. There is no one doing the appropriating therefore I am nothing with the appropriater and sadist other.

Why are there is a desperation to get a boyfriend/girlfriend? Could it be that commercialization has caught up to relationships and the prime world of love? Get real! The very intimate reason to acquire a partner could be to conform. This is similar to owning merchandise and being part of a fad. Acquiring ersatz Longchamp bags and Gucci totes. Perhaps we want a partner because it makes us more like "everyone else." Yasmeen's song When Will It Be Me contains lyrics, "I see the couples are walking by, I feel like I don't wanna be alone today." She is conveying the exact need and she is putting out her necessity to be in a relationship because she feels like she is more alone not conforming and not being with someone. There is no connection with another person which seems to not complete a single person. I can announced leisurely "I am getting a girlfriend because everyone else is falling in love; everyone else is doing it!"This is the tongue and cheek announcement mirroring the trophy girlfriend situation. I am getting a partner because it is an experience. It is disguised as an experience--I should experience it, I should experience it now because I am young. These are phenomenally bad reasons to enter a relationship because it shows the lack of love for oneself. Fromm states that to be able to love another person, you must be able to love yourself. You are the only origin of love, the center of distribution for love. If you cannot love yourself, you do not have a core radiating love, how can you give love or actively love another person if you have no source of love? The very need for a partner is caused by the very desperation. The root of desperation is the call for acceptance and a call for personal justification which is loneliness. To be happy, I in my own right, can acquire a girlfriend and she will make me happy and love me for who I am because I have the right to be happy and to be with someone. So why not now? These questions are absurd because they do not take into consideration the very state of desperation one is in. That is why compensatory remarks and a negligent impatience rules the body.

Trophy partners depend on Cooley's looking glass self theory. I am who I see myself as in relation to what the generalized Other sees me as. I am what I think others see me as. Therefore I will portray myself as a man of honor hand in hand with a deliciously hot partner in heels and short skirts, flailing for attention from other men who die to be in my position. All this strokes the ego graciously and generously raises the ego's expectations for the next partner. Under this belief, the person will drop this current partner for someone better, rendering the relationship useless behind it has even hit its climax. The very problem with entering one's mind is that there is certainty when there is said to be none. A person in a relationship may very well hope for better times ahead but they are certain in their intuition that the relationship has hit rockbottom. Certainly, they can give "second chances," but if these are half-ass chances then they are disavowing their partner by disregarding the very sanctity of a second chance. If you repurpose second chances and edit their weight, you can committing a serious mistake in abrogating trust and emotion. If you manipulate trust, you can flip over the entire relationship.

The worst thing about having a partner for show is that part of the resultant pleasure relies on the public. It relies on what is not private, but rather it relies on public and private. It relies on one's inner emotions of pleasure and satisfaction, but it also relies heavily on what others seem to think of the partner. It creates a supply and demand for attention. Once you receive this attention, you will always seek this direction of attention. Once this attention stops, you will force yourself into believing either you have failed or your partner has failed to give shine to you. It becomes an incredibly self-serving, selfish way of stroking the ego and placing your partner on a pedestal, trophy-izing him/her. To place someone on a pedestal is to go beyond the halo effect. This idiom renders perfection attained when in reality, perfection cannot be attained. This is a self-illusion that is self-aggrandizing and ego-stroking. Falling in love should have nothing to do with anyone else besides the two persons in love with each other. The keywords here are "with each other." It should isolate all other factors. Unfortunately romance does not thrive in a vacuum. There are manifold sources of frustration that plague the stability of a relationship, threatening to tear it asunder. But staying genuine to one's intentions whatever they maybe is staying genuine to oneself, and hopefully genuinely to your reciprocating partner.

Then what is the ultimate reason to compare oneself to another person and call the other person a soulmate within a few forsaken days or even weeks? What does this rush imply if not first come first serve? The intractable categorization of women as second class citizens continues when guys commercialize women---"I will score her first." "No she saw me first!" This implies the first come first serve hierarchization. Who is exactly delegating importance. It works for bother parties actually. The girl can have her eyes set on a good body of men while the men can set their eyes on one woman. The girl has her say and she makes her decision. However the first impression as well as order of appearance matters no less. She could be egalitarian and provide all men with similar consideration, but if there is quality over quantity then she will discount quality by edging toward order of appearance. "Whoever captured my heart first gets it."

Why should we ever search the nooks and crannies for love? Because we want a passionate love which will transpire into companionate love. Perhaps we want to experience sexual liberation. Perhaps we want to inseminate our partners and forgo our family legacy/lineage. Perhaps finding a partner will fill an empty house. Perhaps we are too in tune with status quo which glamorizes the need to get married, squander all the money on the honeymoon, and months later, wait on line for food stamps and EBT. The reasons to find love are far too many and unnecessary to demarcate. I cannot say one reason is disingenuine while another is deserving. It is not in my will to ordain partnerships or matchmaking. But I do believe that love is like math. You are either good at it or you are not. Some people are good at math. Some people are not. Maybe love is not for you.