Love is Dead!

Swans mate for life and die of literal heartbreak and penguins propose with a meticulously selected Pebble. Albatrosses learn the art of true Love by closely observing their parents and male pufferfish build multiple houses for multiple purposes for their sole Love. Bonobos practice an intricate courting process passed on throughout successive generations of Lovers and Bowbirds gift their beloved arts and craft projects that they spend weeks working on numerously throughout the year.

Humans, instead, take the alternative route and pursue infidelity, divorce, child marriage, abuse in all its forms, honour killings, domestic violence and cheesy reality shows that claim to unite true Love but instead display 40-minute episodes of diluted porn and foreshadow the inevitable collapse of our obese and apathetic civilisation.

It seems as though every other species has Love figured out except for us.

I’ve never fallen in Love, but I know what one-sided love feels like.

Like singing sweet, serene sonnets to a construction site that is in the process of demolishing your very home. Pleading for it to recognise the hours your cracked hands have spent sculpting each individual brick, only to realise, embarrassingly late, that bulldozers don’t have ears,

Nor a heart.

I’ve never fallen in love but I know what marriage looks like.

Two, resentful, rapidly wrinkling individuals held hostage by holy matrimony. As they busily dig their own graves for their bubbling potential and naive dreams, they occasionally send each other a bitter hex in the form of passive-aggressive text reminding the other to do the damn dishes.

I’ve never fallen in Love, but I know what young love hurts like,

The most embarrassing, utterly cringe and beyond enthralling experience of having ones time so plainly wasted. Just as a barren tree reliably grows plump fruits, as so do the couple of months that you painfully spent talking to That One Boy, birth something of Great Value! So you awkwardly grip your very adolescent binder as you turn the corner of every hallway, praying you won’t bump into them. But you always seem to!

I’ve never fallen in Love, but I know what unrequited Love sounds like.

Like the biting of the lip of swallowing of saliva as one anxiously walks past the other. The Other is usually completely oblivious to the Formers’ existence, or even worse, extremely friendly. Unrequited love sounds like the scribble of your fruitless diary entries that over romanticise an otherwise ordinary and bland individual, and like the scrawls of your manifestation journal, the results of which are often ignored by the Universe because better is coming.

Better is always coming but its footsteps are never heard over your moaning and groaning and futile efforts to bathe in dumpster fire.

I have never fallen in Love and god forbid I do.

Is there anything worse than he/she that is in Love? They hang up their reasonably waged ties of reality and of self and instead weave on Pointe shoes of pointless romance and awkward dates.

In all honesty, without the Nilhilsm of the 21st century and angst of Seventeenhood, I truly hope that soulmates are something more than the result of my overactive imagination and that marriage is more than the adults in my life have so graciously performed it to be. I hope that Love at First Glance is real and followed by an appreciation at Second Glance and deep knowing by the Third. I hope one day to gift pebbles and craft ornate structures of heartfelt metaphorical trash to my One True Love. I hope to be gifted many houses in return and loyalty to the degree of death by said One True Love whilst we teach, by example, to our beloved offspring the Art of Love.

But then again, I hope not.

If Love is dead, maybe it should stay dead. So that fungi and plant life can use its decaying, maggot-infested flesh to bloom and blossom and sprout perfumed buds of individuality, the pursuit of ones True Purpose and the general enjoyment of noble solitude.

Either way, I hope Love is actually dead because that would mean

it was indeed once Alive.