All you need is love (?)

Fittingly for the Valentines weekend, Ryan Kearney writes a humorous piece in the New Republic about love. He says love peaked in 1967 when The Beatles released "All You Need Is Love." Kearney writes,

Its chorus is demonstrably untrue. Love is quite far down on the list of things that humans “need”—in fact, it's not on the list at all. Humans need oxygen, water, and food, in that order. Everything else is optional (though clothes and shelter are nearly essential, depending on the climate). Humans are perfectly capable of living an entire life without love.

Love is at least as harmful as it is beneficial. What’s odd is that our culture recognizes as much, and yet it venerates love while romanticizing the pain it can cause. Yes, we say, ”love hurts, love scars, love wounds,” but such are the risks. The thing is, falling in love is kind of awful, too! The symptoms are much the same as heartbreak: You can't eat because you’re permanently queasy, can't sleep when she’s not beside you, can't pay attention at work or think straight at all (I write and read books far less when I’m infatuated with someone), and you spend most of your time crafting overwrought emails, looking at photos of her, and stalking her social media accounts. We wax lyrical about how love makes fools of us, but there is nothing admirable about being a fool.

This is exactly the problem with being "in love": It is the most subjective feeling in the human experience. "You'll know it when you feel it," people say. This is horseshit. I have been convinced several times of it, only for the feeling to fade (or be stomped out). Furthermore, several people who have told me “you’ll know” are no longer with the person who made them "feel it."

Kearney quotes from a recent piece in Atlantic:

With Valentine's Day around the corner, many Americans are facing a grim reality: They are love-starved. Rates of loneliness are on the rise as social supports are disintegrating. In 1985, when the General Social Survey polled Americans on the number of confidants they have in their lives, the most common response was three. In 2004, when the survey was given again, the most common response was zero.

Kearney concludes,

while I do enjoy spending a fair amount of time alone, I’m not foolish enough to believe that I’m happier now than I would be with someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. But let’s please stop, as a culture, pretending like there is nothing in the world quite like falling in love, and that we should aspire to finding it above all else. That’s not just an insult to the human experience. It’s an insult to life itself.