What is the meaning of life?
Is love the meaning of life?
If the answer is yes, then what is love?
We have all faced these questions -or in other words these existential worries, as we usually call them – at some point in our lives and we have tried to define them from the point of view either of an incurable romantic or of a realist. Personally, I disagree with this dichotomy of opinion, as I declare myself an incurable romantic myself and while explaining those terms demands a use of words that do not fit the rational vocabulary- words like feelings, magic, and other similar scary things- it is in fact the rational way of thinking that holds all the answers.
Love is a mysterious thing; by taking a quick or as many would say convenient look at it, love is a feeling. It is a feeling with no boundaries, which expects to be defined, and that is the reason why most of its definitions end up being incomplete, inadequate, or abstract. Well, love is a decision, a conscious process, exactly because it communicates someone’s choice to be the best version of themselves, by expanding their limits for them to ensure the spiritual growth of another person. A process that certainly goes both ways.
The difficulty of life suggests that love is a decision. We are constantly surrounded by stress, responsibilities, deadlines and because of that we have little time left while love requires space and effort. Therefore, to keep it alive, you need to choose it everyday by showing it in practice and at the same time you need to decide to outrun your own dark side (selfishness, jealousy, cowardice, fear).
Love, on the other hand, is magic. It is blessed with something uniquely unbeatable and unimaginable. It has the power to reduce entropy, the natural tendency towards decay and disorder, since its imprint lives forever, creating a chain of love in space-time (domino effect). Sometimes, however, it loses its meaning or is misinterpreted.
Being in love is a barrier to true love, since what most people do not understand is that the feeling of being in love eventually dies- because it does- then love begins and they just give up trying. In addition to that, we let the toxic myth of our ideal other half eat us alive and we end up being trapped in the search for it without even considering that we are at the same time both the sculptor and the sculpture of our relationship. There are indeed many who confuse love with addiction, projecting their own feelings onto their partner to mirror the behavior they need, without realizing that by doing this they are destroying any channel of communication they have with their partner and are building a selfish, addictive relationship. Lastly, love’s biggest hurdle is boredom, which prevents us from putting in the amount of effort we need to succeed.
And if the explanation above isn’t practical enough for you, it’s time to let you know that love can be explained and matched through the tax system, so I took the courage to declare that love is like the IRS. So, if someone, for instance, decides to open a new business, let’s say this “business” is love, exactly because they will need to pay their taxes, they sort of begin a new relationship. In our case this relationship is erotic. What are these taxes though? Taxes are all those difficult, painful, frightening, but necessary emotions (retreat, surrender, exposure, acceptance) that each member has to “pay up” so that love can continue and blossom.
In a tax system, though, let’s not forget that in addition to taxes, there are also revenues. As a revenue we define any sort of income someone can get by exploiting their own assets. In the state of love, the assets we exploit are ourselves, since everyone hides their own inner treasure and as with all assets you can expand them and therefore by trying you can improve and cultivate yourself accordingly by turning yourself into the best version you can ever be. The resulting income is something of undeniable priceless value and that is a meaningful loving relationship.
Participating in the tax system comes with some responsibilities like submitting your tax return, meaning a declaration of your last year’s income. And while someone who doesn’t mean well would say that in a real tax system a long tax declaration also comes with an increase in taxes- which is something no one likes- in our ideal system this works proportionally and at the same time beneficially, as the more the taxes are the more efficient and powerful the love is.
All tax systems on the other hand host the so-called fraudsters or, in our case, tax evaders. People who are in fact hiding their assets in order to avoid the taxes assigned to them only until their fraud gets discovered and they need to pay a heavy fine. But what does it mean to be a fraudster and a tax evader in the state of love? It means that you are hiding or lying about your feelings, that you decide to maintain your defense mechanisms, that you imprison yourself in a role, that you do not show all these elements that make up your inner treasure and that you create fictitious relationships. The fine, in that case, isn’t monetary but it is definitely worse, way more dramatic and painful, exactly because it means that the relationship is now dead and so is the love. Therefore, the saying that good accounts make good friends can be transformed by adding to it that good accounts also make good partners who make each other’s best friends anyway.
In conclusion, we can state that love is like taxes, exactly because no one knows really what it is until they have to deal with it.
