Why Love Is Complicated

Brittany Halliday
January 26, 2013
Professor Swords
Paper #2

Significant yet Difficult

Love is like a rumor; everyone talks about it yet few truly know the truth. If there is an emotional state that we as humans idealize it is love. However, we want nothing of its dark side and demand that it always hides its flaws. Nonetheless many of us are unprepared for the battles that the heart must be willing to endure in order to take on the emotion of love. Many people fantasize about what it will be like to fall in love and dream about their perfect match. Individuals spend their whole lives so fixated on the love that they might one-day experience that they often forget about the love they are surrounded by every day. The significance level placed on love is extremely high and many people believe that they could not live without it, yet it is also one of the most difficult and complex emotions to sustain.
Love is the first emotion that human beings ever encounter. As a fetus in the womb a child can become emotionally attached to the sound of their parent’s voice, loving them before they even know them. The same goes for parents, the minute a woman finds out she is with child an instant bond and love is formed. It is an emotion that we are genetically programmed to experience yet many people spend a majority of their life trying to understand the complexity of it. Every day people will talk about things they love such as their pet, phone, siblings, or some other aspect of their life. However, one of the hardest things for some people to find is a significant other that they can share the real bond of love with and while the whole world is in search of this idea of ”true love” few find it because few understand it.
Countless individuals would agree that without love life would be seemingly pointless. Love provides us all with comfort as well as a solid foundation for our endeavors. People who have love in their lives are happier overall. They are more tolerant, willing to help others, and show more understanding. These are the very qualities that improve our character and make us better individuals. With all that being said I think it is easy to agree that love is one of the most, if not the most, valued emotion a human endures. The idea of love is something that many people strive for. Whether it is to find love with a partner, find love in your work, or just to love life in general, the goal of being truly compassionate about something keeps us motivated to work hard in everything we do. While motivation and love seem to be tied together for most people some individuals would rather link the word love with words like anger, sadness, and non-existent.
At our very best, we human beings are universally imperfect. We all share some form of annoying habit and often focus more on the negative traits of people than positive. Even though many people are born into a loving environment where they are subconsciously learning how it feels to give and receive love, most individuals will eventually be corrupted by the disappointment and evil that life throws at us. Love is often like a dark mystery leaving people with unanswered questions, open wounds, and a sadness that they cannot handle on their own. Nonetheless, even though love can cause such heartache, it is also love that helps us overcome this sadness. Love and support from our family and friends is usually the best therapy someone can receive during hard times. This is the sole reason why love is so significant yet difficult. The same emotion that breaks you is sometimes the very emotion that heals you.
By the time most of us were 10 we learned the hard lesson that life is just not fair. Life is a cruel thing and unfortunately sets us up to be hurt. We learn to love the people around us only to have them be taken away by death. This unfortunate truth can sometimes subconsciously make people want to truly care about no one but himself or herself. We become self-absorbed and often turn on the people that have loved us from the beginning of our existence and focus on the relationships that usually end in disappointment. So many of us unknowingly base our relationships on selfish love, we search for the “perfect” individual that must meet our endless list of qualifications forgetting about the true goal of a relationship. We become fixated on what our partner can do for us and less focused on what we can give to our partner. When we give up our expectations for love to be ideal we are often hit with a love that we never thought we would find, hence the saying “love happens when you least expect it”.
Love is a headache and a heart breaking adventure. Most of the people who experience it will be left with deep scars that they can never completely make disappear. Some forms of love come so naturally we often take them for granted. The love for your family and friends is something most people do not have to put much time and effort into. However, the love we try to obtain from a partner can be one that completely tears us apart. And yet, we are always eager to go back and try times and times again. Why is that? Simply because, no matter how hurtful love can be it is still the most fulfilling emotion known to human life. It makes even the darkest times seem tolerable and gives us the hope we need to be successful in life. Love makes the world go round, it hurts people and it heals people and often arrives when you least expect it. These unexplainable traits of the emotion are the reasons why love is so significant yet so difficult at the same time.