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Romantic love is an illusion.

It is the misguided results of romanticism which revered passion and feeling over reason.

Assume the mythos of love at first sight and happily ever after.

Love has been commandeered by market opportunities for profit.

Hallmark and Disney movies, greeting card and jewelry companies, and so on.

They all fan the flames of love with dollars.

In the end, love hurts all those who believe in it.

No real love story ends well.

There is no such thing as the one.

These are perhaps a few of the things a realist or pessimist might say, or at least think in the privacy of their mind, about love.

Perhaps this kind of person is and has always been a realist about everything, and so, they are also a realist about love.

Or, perhaps they have witnessed a relationship crumble in and destroy those housed by it.

Perhaps their parents.

Or, perhaps they have experienced it themselves.

Terrible pains caused by their own experiences of a love's failure.

Whatever the case may be, let's grant that, on some level, it is all true.

It is true that romantic love as an ideal is illusory.

It is true that romantic love has been contorted by hands needing for money.

And it is true that love will never bring everlasting happiness, and no instance of it will ultimately end well.

So now what?

Is this the end of one's hope for love?

It doesn't have to be.

In truth, why would love be any different?

What in life isn't immensely painful and confusing and uncertain and hard?

What in life isn't idealized or romanticized?

What hasn't been commandeered and exploited for profit?

What in life ends well?

Life doesn't end well.

The problem, at least for those of us who have found ourselves considering love through a sort of realist, pessimistic lens, isn't love, but our definitions and expectations of it.

Love is often viewed as a proxy for happiness.

At the very least, many people view romantic love as a means to happiness.

This is, arguably, where the disaster starts.

We build our romantic hopes on the haphazard and foolishly optimistic foundation that love will solve things it cannot.

For most of us, the sort of everlasting, potent happiness endorsed in the oversaturated final scenes of a romance story is not a particularly likely goal no matter what happens in our lives.

We will all likely struggle with terrible bouts of misery and anxiety and regret, regardless of whether we are single or in a relationship, regardless of essentially anything.

At best, life is fundamentally difficult.

At worst, it is fundamentally suffering.

And so, take the sort of ultimate happily ever after happiness off the table and assume a pessimistic attitude toward love.

And then redefine it.

Or at least work toward understanding and practicing a more realistic, functional version of it.

Of course, there are things in life that do increase our well-being.

And there are things that add meaning to our lives.

Family, friendships, relationships, mutual support and care, novel experiences, notable achievements, and so on, can and do play a role in one's quality of life and sense of meaning.

And the sort of shared, mutual intertwinement of experience through love can both provide and augment the potency of these aspects of life.

Harry Rees, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology says, Many, many studies have shown that people who are in relationships, on average, are happier than people who are not in relationships.

This simply means that, on average, people who are not in relationships over the course of their lifespan are unhappier in many different respects than people who are in relationships.

In reference to the impact of marital status on happiness over time, psychologist Richard Slatcher says, Couples still end up staying happier than they started with, but essentially, that declines a little bit over time.

A study done at Michigan State University by psychologist Richard Lucas has also shown that married couples adapt to their relationship circumstances in return to their relative baseline of well-being.

It appears that having a healthy, functional romantic relationship tends to have a positive effect on one's well-being.

But once one has a reasonably healthy and cooperative relationship, there is a limit and relative timeline to which a relationship can increase one's happiness.

It is not as if there is some other, better person or relationship that will make a significant improvement beyond one's general optimal baseline of happiness.

With this, on average, one should strive for a supportive romantic but not expect or depend on it to be some sort of bottomless well of contentment.

Another belief that can cause destruction and disappointment is the notion of the one.

One person who is perfect for us, who will always understand our every need and impulse, who will cater to our every quirk and neuroses, and yet have none themselves.

For most of us, we will not just simply click automatically and enduringly with anyone.

We will, of course, click more, or notice a greater potential to click more, with some people over others.

And this is undoubtedly relevant.

But equally relevant as recognizing that properly clicking and staying clicked is not going to be simple or easy, or even really possible in any absolute sense.

The gears will grind as often as their teeth will sit perfectly into the base circle.

A more reasonable prospect of love starts not with the ideal that one can find someone who does not have qualities that will be difficult to deal with, but rather that one can find someone with difficult qualities worth dealing with.

In the words of the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, all too often, when we love somebody, we don't accept him or her as what the person effectively is.

We accept him or her insofar as this person fits the coordinates of our fantasy.

We misidentify, wrongly identify him or her, which is why, when we discover that we were wrong, love can quickly turn into violence.

There is nothing more dangerous, more lethal for the loved person than to be loved, as it were, for not what he or she is, but for fitting the ideal.

The prospect of reasonable and meaningful love is, like all things in life, found in the direction of effort, care, and thoughtfulness.

The uniquely dangerous problem with romantic love is that it can literally alter the chemistry of the brain and reduce one's ability to reason and think critically.

The American of dopamine in the brain produce extremely focused attention, as well as unwavering motivation and goal-directed behaviors.

These are central characteristics of romantic love.

Lovers intensely focus on the beloved, often to the exclusion of all around them.

Indeed, they concentrate so relentlessly on the positive qualities of the adored one that they easily overlook his or her negative traits.

As a result, knowing the difference between being foolishly compelled toward a relationship and being foolishly dismissive of a relationship is anything but easy or clear.

All we can do here is try our best to use the speed bumps of time and patience to help ensure our car doesn't fly recklessly down the street in either direction.

We all must be willing to take our leaps of faith in life.

True, wise leaps of faith, arguably, are not in anything without evidence or prospect, but rather, in things that are uncertain but are possible, capable of profound meaning and value if we land the dismount.

And love, for at least some of us, can be that.

The right person, the one, is who you settle on and fight for and with.

There is no one other than the one you choose and make.

Love of this form is not cute or flowery.

It does not go on social media or fit neatly on the final page of a novel.

It is, rather, found in an open bathroom door, in helping with an unsavory ailment, in accepting and patiently sitting alongside an unexplainable meltdown that continues all night.

It is found in stopping a weird eating habit or working through a bad financial habit.

It is found in uncertainty and struggle.

It is found in freedom and friction.

It is found in being told you did something wrong that you cannot for the life of you understand.

And it is found in least on occasion, that you, in fact, probably did something wrong.

It is found in working through this understanding and it is found in understanding that some understandings will never quite be reached and some problems will never quite be solved.

The author, Bell Hooks, wrote, True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish, it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change.

The heartbeat of true love is the willingness to reflect on one's actions and to process and communicate this reflection with the loved one.

Of course, in the end, love will inevitably not end well.

Life does not end well.

Of course, love will be painful and filled with uncertainties and confusions.

Life is a treachery of these things.

Of course, we won't find someone that takes the pain of life away.

Nothing can.

Of course, if you're going to live in and through this pit of existence with all its pains and uncertainties and challenges, do you want to fight for and work toward something meaningful or not?

If yes, is having someone to help with and share in the sufferings together, to laugh at the absurdities together, and to occasionally triumph over the hardships together meaningful?

If yes, then try to love.

Work toward and learn to love.

Make it a goal like anything else, not to attain, but to get better at.

When one wants to become physically healthier or financially more well off, one doesn't accomplish these things by waiting around with the same know-how and skills.

They put effort toward understanding how to eat healthier or make better financial decisions, and they practice the habits and skills required to do so.

In many ways, love is no different.

We should not expect love to save us, but we can perhaps, with the right effort and patience, find that it can help make the inability to ever be saved more endurable and worth enduring.

Of course, love is not for everyone and will not work out for everyone, even if they do everything right.

Like anything else, luck is the ultimate arbiter of success.

And for some, it might simply be of less interest than living a meaningful life as a single person, which is entirely reasonable and achievable.

Modern culture undoubtedly glorifies relationships as a universality, which they are not.

What's important, however, is knowing what is important to you, what you value and find meaningful, and ensuring that your perspective is not just the sour grapes of a misguided belief in an impossible ideal.

If love is important to you, throw out the ideal and build something real.

Something you can attain and manage and love.

Something that, amongst very few things, you can look back on at the end of your life and tear up about.

Not at the loss of it, but at the indescribable connection and meaning you got to experience and share with another person.

You picked out that one person.

You fought for that one person.

You believed in that one person.

You worked through yourself and them with and for that one person.

You learned more about and from that one person than anyone else.

You loved that one person.

In the words of Zizek, love, for me, is an extremely violent act.

Love is not, I love you all.

Love means I pick out something, even if this something is just a small detail, a fragile individual person.

I say, I love you more than anything else.

In this quite formal sense, love is evil.

Thank you for watching.

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