Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Boy meets girl on cruise ship, falls in love with girl, but girl is socioeconomically inaccessible and also about to marry someone else. And also there’s a huge iceberg into which the cruise ship collides, and most people on board die—including the boy. Nevertheless, she cherishes his memory for the rest of her life and never again falls in love the way she did during that magical April of 1912.
Or how about this one: boy meets girl, convinces her to date him against her better judgment, falls in love with girl, but she is carted away to a snobby private college and never replies to his letters. Also then she dates and gets engaged to someone else. Nevertheless, he forgoes his other life goals in order to build her a dream house they once talked about during their summer-long relationship. Eventually she realizes her mistake and runs back into his arms and they are in love forever and ever.
There are more where those came from—a never-ending supply of stories about never-ending devotion. Around Valentine’s Day, the urge to believe in romantic fate gets worse: We should supposedly be confessing our undying love to someone and accompanying this promise with flowers and chocolates and other cliches. If we don’t have an eternally special someone in our lives, we should wallow like the miserable wretches we are.
We are continually fed this ideal by Hollywood, Hallmark, Harlequin and other media outlets that don’t start with “H.” As a result, everyone gobbles up the aesthetic of forever. We are taught to love soulmates and lifelong romances and destined happiness.
If you’re shaking your head at the idea of a romantic soulmate, don’t worry—this phenomenon isn’t limited to just the gushy aspect of life. We’re all in love with the idea of forever. Whether this forever is spent in love, or in companionship, or in loneliness, or in hatred, or even in death—whatever the perpetual circumstance may be, we’re impressed when it occurs.
Alongside everlasting romance, we are also intrigued by noble martyrs and lasting friendships. We place on a pedestal those willing to die for a cause, believing that their stubborn adherence to a principle is worth more than our own piddling part-time hobbies. We measure the depth of our friendships by how long they’ve lasted. After all, longevity reflects true loyalty and investment, which makes it all the more worthy, right?
This is how the logic proceeds: If we really loved someone, we would stay with them forever. If we really understood a friend’s innermost self, we could stay close regardless of time or distance. If we were really passionate about a cause, we would be willing to sacrifice almost anything for it.
This is supposedly what real sentiment looks like. But I also suspect that a deep-seated insecurity underlies the collective ideal. Fetishizing forever is easy if we buy into the inherent value of temporal continuity, if we think it lends legitimacy to an otherwise intangible emotion—for example, love or friendship.
But it’s also the oldest behaviorism trick in the book. It supposes that nothing matters but an outward sign of dedication and belittles anything that doesn’t make the forever cut. As an emotional defense, this makes sense. What friendship would admit its own inevitable collapse? Who wants to be inessential in someone else’s life? We would all like to be too important to be left behind.
Permanence, however, has never been a part of the whole being alive equation. Some wise scholar named Charles Darwin once wrote something about adaptation, though he never strictly meant it to be about individual action. His lesson still sticks though: In order to live, we must change. We must adjust. Nothing is worth single-minded fixation, not even love, not even an ideal.
Though forever may seem to be the more aesthetic choice, it’s hardly the practical one. Necessitating permanence is as unrealistic as it is damaging. If we adopt the standard set universally by rom-coms and Valentine’s Day cards, we would have to admit that every short-lived friendship and every ended relationship mattered very little to us. We would have to believe in the eventual culmination of our lives into something perfect and unalterable, fated and enduring.
The alternative to that mentality is one infinitely more well-adjusted and levelheaded. Instead, we could shed the inaccurate expectations we’ve been spoon-fed our entire lives and realize that the only constant is change. We could accept the momentary significance of our human connections without demanding that they last a lifetime.
In essence, we could leave the martyrdom to the martyrs. They can keep suffering for the sake of principle. Thanks, but no thanks—we’d rather be moving on with our lives.
Shining Li is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
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