A disturbing cultural revelation: we are a desperate society that seeks love as a cure for every malady, including love itself. All too often it is not the person we seek but the feeling, the need to be needed, the drug of wanting, so that the remedy for our anguish becomes the problem itself, and we will go to any length to get it.
For too many of us, especially women, and those of us given the label Generation X, love is not necessarily love, the search not necessarily the search for the absolutely right other, but the fear of being alone. Some even revel in love's absence, wallowing in the self-pity and attention that comes from being "un"-coupled.
The institution, or the state, however temporary, of being alone is as dreaded and, oddly, as romanticized, as that of love, and this phenomenon perpetuates our cycle of errors, fascination, and pain. In a culture of quick fixes, Internet dating, fast food, serial romance and the Miracle Bra, we may have impaired our sense of permanence. The general attitude of pop-culture toward relationships may preclude the desired effect- unless said effect is that of one-night stands and loneliness.
Media does not make it okay to be single. New, and just in time to make the winter pretty uncomfortable, the barest cuts yet from Hanes to Victoria's Secret. The real secret is that no self-respecting woman over a size ten can wear the stuff. The average American woman is approximately a size twelve -- again contradiction and perpetuation of the cycle. There are serial instant coffee commercials documenting apartment building affairs between beautiful people, and greeting cards for such occasions as pick-ups, proposals, and confessions of adultery. And we buy all of this in the name of what?
The pressure oozes through our radios and computer screens, new and ever improving renditions of the same old refrain of the Great American Love Song; "be young, have lots of sex, and drink Pepsi," though not necessarily in that order.
Our fears and insecurities are full of contradictions. Once we find love, if we recognize it as love, we all to often push it away at the slightest hint that we might have to pick out curtains, and opt for the instant, obviously doomed relationships we're familiar with, inevitably wallowing in loneliness once again. But then the wallowing becomes fascination. The absence of a hand to hold becomes, if not liberating, romanticized, and we cling fast to the bosom of pop-culture philosophy instead. Void becomes art and the public comes in droves to witness the freak, the bitter mourner of abstinence or regrets, the unfortunate visionary, the commiserator, the pop-icon. We swear we will never be that person, and we wish we could be. We discuss this as though we are unaware of our surroundings, and we go home to watch old movies on the sofa with a pitcher of mudslide and a box of tissues, snuffing out illumination into the overflowing ashtray of American discontent. We feed on the morbid fascination of the cultural heresy of being alone, but whether we want to be that person depends on which commercial is on at any given thirty second interval.
Everyone walks away sated until we realize we are drained. Cycles can be comforting, seemingly satisfying, disturbing things. They comfort yet strike fear in the heart of a culture in which the ideas of both love and emotional autonomy are romanticized. This leaves us running in circles and tripping over ourselves at every turn, willingly. We pick up and try again once in while, only to recoil from permanence in lamp-lit rooms of unrequited gloating where we write the seldom recited poetry of our wretched fortunes. If we fail, we also, all too often, fail to learn. The only thing we can do is to be aware.
