Liking Is For Cowards

Liking Is For Cowards. Go For What Hurts.
By: Jonathan Franzen

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you're going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you'll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don't like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you're having an actual life. 

Suddenly there's a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me? 

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie. 

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill.  

Thought Catalog

Sometimes I rather curl up in bed with a good read instead of going out to get wasted with the rest of the twenty-somethings out there. Lately, I've been hooked on Thought Catalog. The site is ran by a younger group of free-lance writers who don't take themselves too serious, and comprised of a wide range of articles and humorous anecdotes. Their stories incorporate plenty of wit, sarcasm and intelligence. I find this new sort of breed of journalists to be rather entertaining and get a kick out of what I come across while exploring the latest. 

You may have to look past your initial reaction and just laugh about some of the articles, as I'm sure there are people who wouldn't condone certain topics brought up. They do touch on current events and issues of a more serious nature as well, but it's pretty entertaining to delve into the less serious and more raunchy/humorous ones. Check it out for yourself:

What Happens When You Get Into a Relationship 

By: Ryan O'Connell

When you get into a relationship, you will be a lot happier? I think that’s how it works. I’m not entirely sure. You’re supposed to feel like you’ve won some implicit race—the race to monogamy and security and family vacations and cocktail parties and faded polaroids and diapers and screaming and tears and orgasms and i love you and i hate you. Yeah, I think that’s what it’s all about.

When you get into a relationship, you’re going to be a lot fatter? You’ll be eating spaghetti and meatballs every night, which will be topped with I’m In Love sauce. Every dollop of I’m In Love sauce contains 3,000 calories though. In fact, every time you tell your significant other “I love you”, you go up a waist size. I think this is okay. I think this doesn’t matter. I think if you’re going to be fat, you might as well be in love.

When you get into a relationship, you’re going to forget about all the bad things that ever happened to you? That’s what happens when you have someone. You. Just. Forget. You’re on love drugs, which causes amnesia, which causes happiness. Every moment of your life is dedicated to being present and attentive. The long stretch of time that exists ahead of you doesn’t feel so daunting. I think that’s how it works. I really don’t know, you know?

When you get into a relationship, it will fix everything? You’ll stop getting sad while watching certain movies or feeling like a piece of crap when you read Cosmopolitan. You’re invincible to it now. They can’t get to you anymore. The lambs have stopped screaming. I’m not a doctor though. Like, I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure about all of this.

When you get into a relationship, you’re going to be hurting someone very badly someday. Because that relationship will alter at some point and it will feel like the wind has been knocked out of you. This is how it all works. This I know for certain. I know this more than the weight gain and the fixing everything and the cocktail parties and the diapers and the orgasms. This has happened to me. This has happened to you. This happens. It’s sad, I guess, but it’s also just what we have to endure as people with brains and hearts and genitalia. Getting into a relationship means getting outside of yourself and into someone else, and then finding your way back to you again. The whole process just makes you feel so…alive? Yes, that’s it. That’s what it’s all about. Feeling alive big bang boom. Bingo. Can I go now? 

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a few more articles I enjoyed: 
-What I Actually Think During A Random Hook Up
-5 Reasons I Hate Cell Phones (And You Should Too)
-A List of Highly Effective Ways To Procrastinate
-The Pros And Cons Of Being Introverted

-Top 5 Things People Like To Write On Someone's Facebook Wall

-Being Depressed Has Benefits

Revisiting Perks

I was happy to come across this article on Thought Catolog because The Perks of Being a Wallflower was one of my favorite books when I was younger. Even now I'll go back and read a passage or two and feel a sort of nostalgia for that time in my life when I had first discovered the book, and how nice it was to find I wasn't the only one with those same types of thoughts or feelings. It made me feel not-so-alone at a time in my life when I could very much relate to the main character of the book, Charlie.

By Ryan Gilbert

For those of you not familiar with the story, I will give you a brief synopsis. Perks is a novel written as a series of letters from a narrator, Charlie, to an anonymous “friend.” Charlie is a teenager who is about to enter his freshman year of high school and he describes various scenes of his life over the course of one year in these letters. The events Charlie describes in his candid and bare-faced letters involve a mix of the usual and not-so-typical teenage problems: sex, drug use, loneliness, suicide, homosexuality, pregnancy, and, overall, the awkward times of adolescence. Charlie is the titular “wallflower” of the novel and we see everything through his unjaded and trusting eyes. In his first letter, Charlie writes, “So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.” This simple confession is, in essence, what the novel is all about. (read more)

(photo credit: Jasmine Raena)