Love or virulence?

“Love didn’t meet them at their best, it met them in their mess,” with this “quote” I’ll start writing, and I’ll finish with it, too. Quotes like that flood social media home pages on the daily, while they’re being infused in movies and series, romanticized and normalized leading to a fear of missing out on this experience (perhaps “fomo” – fear of missing out), of missing out on this kind of love that will redeem and levitate us. Looking for the sublime, the supreme, the maximum in our romantic relations is beautiful but at the same time terribly problematic and it’s unbearably disappointing when the denial of realizing its absence makes its home in our mental trauma, with the promise of healing them.

“Love didn’t meet them at their best, it met them in their mess,” and saved them, as it’s always insinuated. It’s a fairy tale we’ve been told since young, a fairy tale that validates our essential need for companionship, replacing the lost part of the indispensable shackle that was never constructed as it should during our childhood. We reach adulthood and we look for a manic pixie girl or boy to liven and heal our childhood traumatic shackles of which our powerless mental organ itself couldn’t take care. We’re trapped in a human tropes hunt, a hunt of stereotypes we think match our trauma, and we don’t truly look at the person in front of us.

And that’s when virulence begins. When I can’t look at you for who you are and I’m only looking at the characteristics that I feel are a good match with what I need, then that denotes the beginning of a toxic relationship. The personification of our deepest mental needs paired with the innate need for companionship and our mentally fragile childish ego, drowns us inside a fairy tale, whose well-promised happy ending won’t ever come. And it won’t come because no one and nothing in this world exists only for our personal redemption. Such a belief is not only self-centred, but also utopic.

It’s not love that blinds us and obligates us to remain within toxic and abusive relationships. It’s our unbearable existential fear of loneliness, of now and of tomorrow; it’s the unbearable childhood traumatic shackles; it’s the unfulfilled unconscious needs that aren’t transubstantiated. And all this can be found within the spectrum of what’s normal. Virulence belongs among that spectrum, because no one was born with their deepest mental worries solved, instead their own birth was the reason behind all of them. So let’s not romanticize what we ourselves are afraid to touch, let’s not count on others to complete us, because we’re not half or incomplete. Let’s find the courage and the strength to stand on our feet and confront our defences. Only then virulence won’t surround us, and maybe we’ll have a chance to touch the dreamy sublime, because it will exactly emanate from ourselves.

“Love met them in their mess, and they were smart enough to let it go.”

Author: Faidra Gatsarouli

Photography by Simeon Maniatis