I'm on a dating site. Have been for several years now, but I don't do much more than answer questions and occasionally tweak my profile, hoping that somehow the right person will reach out to me.
I know life doesn't work that way.
That person doesn't know me, they only know a picture and a few words. Words they can only try to construct into an idea of me. But they can't tell if they'd hate my voice, find me overbearing, or be incensed by my living situation. They only have those words to work from.
But that's why we meet, right? We play the numbers game and hope that the next one will be someone we can get excited about, someone we wouldn't feel like we were settling for, someone who might make the world a little more palatable to us.
And then there's sex, along with the animal passions that play to obscure the mind and soul.
And who wouldn't be swayed? Stepping close to someone whose mere presence quickens your heart, the rising flush you can feel beneath the skin, the brush and then taste of another human, a beautiful creature of strength and grace, lightning shackled by earth, governed by a flow as strong and deep as the oceans.
And yet those passions and desires don't help nearly as much as we want them to. The beast growls in its insatiable hunger, but it is not discerning in how it is sated, or by whom. It just wants.
We just want.
I don't know. I just have this feeling that this is all backwards.
I believe in love at first sight. I've always felt that I could walk into a room and know who I would like, who I'm attracted to, who vibrates on my wavelength - whether friend or something more. But that's how I'm built. It's what I like. It's how I process and explore. Seeing someone's character written in their face, their grace, their voice.
But even with that affinity, I can't always know. People are complex and wild and so so mysterious and that's what makes humans so interesting. That the magnificence of their sky can't be seen on their face, in their smile, or even in their eyes.
Unless they show it.
That's why we love all those actors, those singers, those artists. Because the act of bearing your soul is an act of sharing, an opening of a gate that throbs with emotion, with the base and pure need to be seen as you are and to be accepted for it. Because acceptance is love. Not romantic love, but the kind of love that the world shelters us with every day.
The kind of love that moves the universe.
And the reason this all feels backwards is...love isn't just about people selecting each other. It's about the world binding itself, interlacing and creating a future, not just for them, but for everything they know.
Moving that to a check box feels like it's doing the human race a disservice. It's taking away all the angles of love and affection and robbing us of those moments and connections that bind the world together. The connections that make the world work.
I don't know. I just feel like we've made a mistake in distilling our experiences, and not realising that the ones and zeros strip back the beauty of life as well.
Because it makes me wonder what that other world looks like. The one where we created all those spaces to live and breathe and exist with each other, so we could find each other, connect with each other, love each other.
Because that one. That one feels like a world worth living for.
