Heart String Persuasion

With many new exciting avenues of life ever opening and closing around us, I wonder to myself why we still tend to delay our own happiness. In this piece, I delve into the mystery of the 'modern' human's psyche and that odd-but-strangely-self-empowering denial of our own feelings.  More specifically one of the purest forms of happiness: the big L word...

(Love - not lesbians for you Scott Pilgrim addicts out there) 

I do believe that just as the art of correspondence has died, so has the art of realism; as the 'cyber age' continually revolves and evolves around us - resulting in the disintegration of the truest form of vulnerability: speaking from the heart. It's all digitally-delayed responses and too much time given for analysis and thought - instead of real, honest, have-some-balls truth. The saying "Follow your heart" was not initially denoted to mean "Let me think about it for two weeks as we chat and feel our way over skype, Facebook, BBM and I.M" I see this world of technology, and as much as we rely on it, there's an evil in everything truly phenomenal. No longer forced into  blind leaps of faith for lack of mulling-over time, people are given time to over-ponder the simplest emotions, terrified of what might happen. "I may get hurt", "I may hurt her"... How is that train of thought remotely spontaneous, exciting, honeymoon-ish? How is it that we have adopted such a cowardly outlook on something that is supposed to be the purest form of any drug imaginable: the ultimate, euphoric, endorphin-releasing, hypnotic plunge into love?

I have been faced with the desire to say many things that, when revised in my mind, I had realised would have lead to awkward looks, fumbled excuses of "I didn't mean it like that"/ "I don't know what came over me, that's not what I meant to say at all." I choose to keep my mouth closed and bottle up what I truly want to say. Why? I cannot answer this question myself and neither for you, dear reader, but after having read "Man and Boy" by Tony Parsons (which has been recommended to me countless times by an extremely close friend of mine) has made me question a lot of what I have chosen to withhold.

"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you" -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

And so, I ponder life - the constant "races" we run: socially, the daily grind, games of love...

How often do we stop for a few seconds and just let realisation come to us? Or love? That's not to say that my advice is to take yourself out of the equation and wait solely for love to do do all the work; a miracle it would be to answer a door to the proverbial 'winds of love'.  I'm not living the script of a Walt Disney production and nor are you. Here we are in the throes of mysterious life and life is what we make of it. As there is but one ticket to this ride, so our existence is short and every moment a chance for improvement of the rest of it.

Utter disregard for something that makes us happy can't be sane, can it? Games of the heart often lead to confusion, the colloquially termed 'mind-fuck' and proverbial head-banging-frustration. We're doing it all wrong. Call me old school, but I'd prefer not to have to look for that prime gazelle at the watering hole (that has over-indulged, or not), get ready to pounce, and hope to high hell she still remembers the spark, let alone me, in the morning. Is this really the 'love' we are all looking for? Have the games of love become this perverted?  I'm imagining a few of you with shaking heads and an expression or thought-pattern that goes something like Love? Pffft not for me.. I'm not the relationship kind of person. So be it, but tell me this doesn't hit home. What has happened to romancing? And the getting to know someone part of 'courting' - that which should but doesn't often any more come before the dirty bedroom antics. It is no wonder divorce rates are climbing and families are falling apart - more so that the good ol' days when divorce was taboo. I look at my family and the fact that my parents have provided for me a truly loving environment with a completely monogamous view on relationships , and I hope for the same for myself when I meet that 'someone' and start a family. 

Flowers. Hand holding. Walks on the beach. (I'm a romantic, I know) What has it been replaced with? Shots of Jagermeister, tequila, and one night stands? Don't get me wrong, I realise romancing in this day and age is no longer even slightly similar to those of Humphrey Bogart and Ilsa Lund. We're not running off together like in the black-and-white movies of old. So I accept that the 'love games' are different, that with time comes change and that with the technological age, so then communication has and will continue to metamorphose. A point to mull over though: has romancing, falling in love and feeling real, honest emotions and then saying them out loud without a second thought evolved to the point where people are terrified to truly love?

So, you caught me. I'm a sucker for romance. And as cliche as this may sound, I'm in it for the love. The old school, open-the-car-door-for-her, let's get know each other better (and not in the filthy sense - well, a little bit of that, too) real, honest, knees-like-jelly love.