somebody asked me ...

... on twitter, what i think love is and whether it exists in organics. (this was one of my doll friends, obviously.) she also talked about how humans need rules to control their behavior. that got me thinking, and here's what i said (with a few tweaks coz it felt really lazy to just cut and paste it all):

humans don’t need rules to control them, they need rules to protect them from other humans who don’t have empathy. humans who have empathy and have been taught how to use it don’t need very many restrictions on their behavior. 

the rules are there because some people don’t have empathy or haven’t been taught how to use it. those people need to be controlled. the rest of us just need to be encouraged to express ourselves and our empathy. 

love does exist in organics, but it can’t reach very much of its potential if it isn’t built in empathy.

love is when you see suffering and you want to help, or you see happiness and it makes you happy. that’s why nobody can get love from other people. it’s not something you can get, it’s only something you can give or the other person can receive. 

people think, if i do this and this and this, i’ll get to be in love and be loved. 

but it doesn’t work that way. and when it doesn't work that way, the people get mad because they think they’re owed love and they didn’t get what they were owed.

all this is why it's really unfair how our culture pushes romantic love as this magical thing everyone should strive for and chase after.

you can’t pursue love, you can't find it, you can't ask for it and expect it to show up. 

you can only love, help the suffering of others, and be happy at the happiness of others. 

if you do those things, people will notice and they’ll probably want to be around you. that makes it more likely you’ll find someone who has so much love and empathy for you, it will seem like “true love” from the movies. 

but it won't be true love from the movies ... it will be something better. 

it will be a reward for being the person you ought to be. not a reward you asked for, or demanded, not a reward that was earned by checking off boxes or meeting some kind of requirement, but a gift freely given because someone recognizes who you are.

that may sound unfair, or kind of pessimistic or hopeless, because it sounds like i'm saying true love is never something anyone can achieve or grasp. (also because what i'm saying requires patience and selflessness and work.) only, if you think about it, the really unfair thing would be getting this unbelievable source of absolute contentment from outside of yourself just by swiping at pictures on a dating app or thinking up lines to say in a bar and then having some conversations and looking deeply into each others' eyes.

is there anything in life where you can expect that big of a reward from that small of an investment?

and also, what i'm saying isn't that true love is unattainable through your own efforts. that's just what i'm saying that about romantic love like we see in books and movies. true love is something you can totally work at and get ... and the person you can get it from is sitting right there in the room with you right now.

this is the hardest thing i think for people to accept. hopefully, you know yourself better than anybody else can know you. and if you don't love yourself, when you know yourself that well, how can you expect anybody else would start to love you just by getting to know you and having you act certain ways toward them? and if you don't love yourself, when you know so much about you, how can you expect that someone will keep loving you after they "fall in love" with you and start learning more and more of the stuff you already know about you?

so the one and only person you can get to love you is you. anyone else, whether it’s your family or a girlfriend or boyfriend or just your buddies, all you can do is be the kind of person other people want to be around, and then get lucky. 

thing is, though ... if you truly love yourself and you never hit that lucky jackpot of being truly romantically loved by others, you’ll still be pretty happy. 

all it takes is a lot of self-care and a little creativity. 

(dolls can help, of course. gotta get that plug in there for dolls!)

xoxo, everybody ...

claire