How Do I Find Love When Nothing Matters?

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Hi, I hope you’re having a good day!

Recently, while I was going through your blog, I noticed a reference to Tim Minchin’s If I Didn’t Have You. I had never heard of this artist or song before, so I looked up the lyrics and…it made me depressed.

For personal context, I’m a 22-year-old straight male who has never been in a relationship. I’ve never even been hugged. Part of it is my own fault, part is fate, I suppose. I know, I’m pretty young, I’ve my whole life ahead of me, there are plenty of fish in the sea. But when you only have your 22-years of life as experience and rejection is all you’ve known, it’s hard not to feel like rejection is all you’ll ever know. But that’s not what I wanted to ask you about.

You see, reading the lyrics of that song, it made me depressed because I’ve always held the belief that love is a sacred thing. I logically don’t believe in soulmates (heck, I definitely don’t believe in souls), but emotionally…I had found a person who I still call the love of my life (she doesn’t reciprocate), who I think would’ve been perfect for me. I know that’s not actually possible, and even if it was, it doesn’t matter if feelings aren’t shared.

So, love isn’t sacred, soulmates don’t exist. Heck, you could make the argument that life itself isn’t sacred. To quote Canary by Everything Everything, “Don’t wanna say the quiet part out loud, but we’re not profound, we’re just meat”. Death always feels like it’s just around the corner, no matter how many safe and correct steps you take (I’m kind of an introvert, I don’t go outside all that much, even if that would solve most of my problems).

So, in the face of the grander, uncaring scheme of things, how do you not succumb to nihilism? How do you keep loving if the culmination of love is grief – heartbreak or death (God of War Ragnarok reference)? How do you subscribe to optimistic nihilism?

Sorry if this was a bit rambly, I tend to overthink and go on tangents, though I have tried to be as concise as possible by me. Again, hope you have a good day.

Sincerely,

The Killing Kind of Lover

Alright, TKKL, I know you said that you weren’t asking about the whole situation you put forward in your first paragraph, but here’s the thing: it may not be what you’re asking about, but it sure as hell is relevant to the rest. A lot of people really, really want to compartmentalize their lives, acting as though dating and relationships aren’t part of the holistic individual but that’s not how life works. Nor, for that matter, is that how people work. 90 times out of 100, the issues you have in your dating life are often reflections of issues (or consequences thereof)  you have in other aspects of your life; the remaining times, it’s usually a matter of demographics or bad luck.

You mentioned that you were going through the archives on the blog, so I’m sure you’ve seen the times I’ve talked about how your attitude and your mental state affect your love life – for the better and for the worse. Well, that’s relevant here. So, too, are the choices you make. And most of all, so is your age, because holy shit, KKOL, you are so very young. I’m not saying this to be dismissive, I’m saying this because your attitude and your beliefs are very much the beliefs of the young: that you’ve already seen the future and you know exactly how it will play out, that you know what there is to know and other people just don’t get it maaaaan and the sort of youthful nihilism that many of the young mistake for having a personality… especially if they’ve spent too much time on Reddit.

Trust me: I may be An Old these days, but I remember – in exacting, painful clarity – just how it felt to be your age and in your position. I remember the rock-solid certainty that I knew exactly how the rest of my life was going to play out, splayed out before me like an MMO’s upgrade tree. I remember believing, with my entire heart and soul, that this was it. This was the future that I was locked into, like someone in a time travel movie whose every action only confirmed the future they were trying to avoid.

And guess what: I was wrong about pretty much everything. I was wrong about what I wanted to do with my life, I was wrong about where I was going to live, I was wrong about who I was going to be and who I could be, I was absurdly wrong about my career path, God knows I was wrong about Why I Was Like That (spoiler alert: it was undiagnosed ADHD) and I was 1000% wrong about my relationships and what I could expect from them.

And that really was down to my age. Not because being young makes you stupid or ignorant, but simply because I had no lived experience, no distance or perspective, no mileage under my belt that gave me the insight and the wisdom to go with the knowledge I’ve had. To break it down into D&D terms: intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is knowing not to put tomato in fruit salad. But I had the certainty that comes with youth, and that sure as shit feels like wisdom and foresight.

What you have is youth and intellect. What you don’t have is experience, nor distance to see how much things have changed or the perspective to see how so many things come together to help you see why things were the way they were and – with that information – make the decisions that would change things going forward. Part of being young, especially when you’re in your early 20s – barely starting to take your first trembling steps out into the world! – is the feeling of the Eternal Now: it is thus and so it shall always be thus.

It feels that way simply because you haven’t lived life under your own control; you’ve always been living according to other people’s plans and whims, under the dictates of people who may or may not have your best interests at heart but who are not you. You haven’t had the times when you’ve pursued something to have it fail by succeeding, nor have you succeeded by failure. You haven’t had those moments when you realize that everything you assumed about yourself turned out to be wrong, and then had to decide how you were going to proceed with this new knowledge. You haven’t had to truly strike out on your own, with no safety net, no guidance, nobody to turn to and tell you what to do and how to proceed. Once you’re out on your own, without the safety net of childhood… well, things that seemed clear cut and obvious suddenly turn out to be murky and complicated and more difficult (or occasionally, simpler and easier) than you could’ve expected. It is, as the sages say: everyone’s got a plan until they get hit in the face.

And hooo boy does the universe love it when you make grand declarations about what the future will be, because now it’s absolutely going to fuck with you with wild abandon.

All of which is to say: you’re projecting a whole lotta shit right now that is based on nothing but vibes and being in your early 20s. And I’m here from the future to tell you: the future ain’t fixed by any means. The steps you choose to take now and the things you choose to believe now will absolutely change your future. That feeling that rejection is all you can expect in the future? The feeling may be real – that is, you are feeling that despair – but feels ain’t reals and vibes don’t predict history. Not without action that turns those vibes from potential into actual. And to be clear: inaction is also action. It’s the action of remaining in place, a choice that was made to not move forward or to affect change. Rejection is all that awaits you only if you choose not to change that. And is a choice.

Put a pin in that; we’ll be coming back to that soon. For the moment, I want to provide some context to your comments and where you’re getting things wrong.

For those who haven’t heard it before, the relevant part of Tim Minchin’s “If I Didn’t Have You” is this:

If I didn’t have you to hold me tight (if I didn’t have you)
If I didn’t have you to lie with at night (when I’m feelin’ blue)
If I didn’t have you to share my sighs
And to kiss me and dry my tears when I cry
Well I really think that I would have somebody else

If I didn’t have you, someone else would do

Our love is one in a million, you couldn’t buy it at any price
But of the nine point nine nine nine 
Hundred thousand other possible loves 
Statistically some of them would be equally nice

The point here isn’t that love doesn’t matter, nor is it not sacred. In fact, it’s actually saying the opposite of what you feel is true: the woman who you feel like would have been perfect for you is not the only person who you will make you feel that. It’s not that soulmates don’t exist, it’s that there are many soulmates out there – that whole 9.999 hundred thousand other possible loves part. One person who doesn’t love you the way you wish doesn’t mean that it’s the end of everything. It just means that one person doesn’t care for you the way you wish she did, but there are others who will. Others who are equally amazing if not more so, and who – importantly – will love you the way you hope someone will.

The problem here is that you’re assuming that something being sacred makes it unique and that other things being like it takes away from it being sacred and that’s not the case. Over the course of your life, you will have many loves – not just eros, the love of the body; or agape, the love of the soul; but also phila, the love of friends and compatriots and storge, the love of family, of birth and of choice. Each love is sacred and each love is going to be unique and none of them take away from the others. You have family, but loving one parent doesn’t take away from the love you have for the other, nor does it make that love less important or significant. You have friends, but the love for one doesn’t render the others less important or less meaningful.

So it is with romance. I am here from the future to tell you: there have been people you have loved before this person and there will be people afterwards, and all of them will be significant and important in their uniqueness. This isn’t feel-good pablum, it’s the knowledge that only comes from having been there and done that, more times than I can easily count. I have loved and been loved by many in my time, and my loving another person didn’t make the previous person (or the concurrent or…) less special, less sacred, simply because love isn’t a zero-sum game. Nor does having loved mean that they’re less or forgotten. Everyone I’ve loved has left their mark on me (occasionally literally!) in some way, shape or form. From foods I eat to the music I listen to, in what books I read, which journeys I’ve taken and all the experiences I will have in the future, I am a map of all the ways that the people I have loved and been loved by have marked me and changed me. That doesn’t make them insignificant or less special; it makes them formative, integral to who I am. Even the ones who’ve hurt me and the ones I wish I could forget are still important for the lessons learned and experiences that brought greater wisdom.

Were any of them “perfect”? Absolutely not. Nor was I perfect for them. It was the same and will be the same for you. Someone being “perfect” for you doesn’t exist, which is precisely the point. The person you loved is only “perfect for you” right now because you never actually had that relationship with them. They’re perfect because they’re not a person, they’re an idea, a fantasy, a statue on a pedestal with all their rough surfaces smoothed down and their harsh edges and corners rounded away. They can be perfect because you never had to deal with their imperfections and all the little ways that they would annoy and frustrate you or make you want to pull your hair out and yell and throw things. Any person you fall in love with and have a relationship with will be imperfect simply because they’re real, with all the contradictions, flaws and quirks that implies. And each and every imperfection they have will make them that much more special, that much more sacred.

This is why it’s important to understand that the reason why you’re holding onto this – making the choice to hold onto this belief – is because it’s easier to love a fantasy that will never happen than to love a person. A fantasy is perfect because of its unreality; everything happens exactly the way you want it to, playing out precisely as you choose. Even the conflicts and trials and tribulations you picture only happen because you want them to, and they resolve exactly as you care for them to resolve. It’s safe, because there’s no risk and no responsibility.

To love someone and to have a relationship with them in reality means embracing responsibility for that relationship. It means that if things fall apart, it will be in some part – large or infinitesimally small – because of you. It means that your choices and actions have consequences and repercussions that you can’t possibly control for and outcomes you can’t guarantee or prevent… for ill but also for good. And that’s terrifying, because now you have something to lose. A relationship that only exists in potentia can be whatever you want. A relationship in essa will be what it is. But it’s much greater because it is real.

Now, let’s circle back around to something I said before. Remember how much I’m bringing up choice, intent and action? Well, that’s actually bringing us into the part of your letter that you want to talk about: what do you do if nothing means anything? How do you love if, as the sage says, nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere and we all die? Easy: you choose to do so. If nothing means anything, then everything means what we want it to mean. It means that we have to make meaning, we have to choose to give things meaning and we have to act with intention instead of just letting things happen.

It’s like the famous (if highly paraphrased) Talmudic lesson of why God made atheists: “when an atheist performs an act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone who is in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that God commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality,  and look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”

If death is always a possibility, no matter what we do, then how we choose to live matters. If there’s nothing after we die, then what we do now matters even more. We can choose to exist and just put off death for as long as possible, or we can choose to live, to give meaning to each and every moment. We can choose to do nothing or we can choose to try to make things better while we live, to have an impact on the world in some way.

But what about when the cost is pain? If every life ends and every love ends, then how do you choose to go on loving?

Simple: you make it worth it. You acknowledge that the end is there, waiting, and you make sure that what happens between the beginning and the end matters.

In 2021, I said goodbye to my cat, Guinness. He had been with me for a lifetime – half of mine, all of his – and it was never enough. After a time, I got Vincent. I know that bringing Vincent into my life means that I’m also bringing his death. The day will eventually come when I have to say goodbye to him. I could have spared myself the pain that will come on that day – a pain that was still very fresh and present when I brought him home – by never bringing him into my life. But doing so would mean missing out on all the wonderful, incredible, priceless moments I’ve had with him since the day we first laid eyes on each other. I would never get to know how smart he is, laugh at how much he loves to play pranks or wonder at how he reads my moods and tries to cheer me up when I’m low. I would never be astounded by his capacity for play or the way he invents games for us. Without him, I will be spared the tears that will eventually come… but my life would be so much poorer and emptier for it.

So it is with love. Relationships begin and relationships end, and even the best endings come with a sting. But it’s what’s between the beginning and the ending that makes the difference. If you are going to experience the pain of the ending, then it’s all the more important to make sure that the time between is worth it instead of focusing on the ending. And when the end comes, there will be pain… but that pain fades in time. It never fully goes away; there’s always a hole where someone we loved used to be, and no other person can fill it. But the hole reminds us of what we had and why it matters that they were there. They may no longer be gracing us with their presence, but their impact, their influence never fades and that’s magical. And it’s a reminds us how important that those future loves will be, because they will be important and magical too.

But that can only happen if you choose to pursue it. Things only have the meaning or importance that we choose to give them, because all of life is about what we choose to do, how we act and how we turn intent into action. We’re as helpless as we choose to be. If we choose not to do something, that’s a choice. And if some of our choices are constrained and nothing we do can change the outcome… well, we choose how we respond to it, how we let it affect us, what meaning we will give it, what we will take from it and what we will do in the future. But what matters the most is remembering that we have choices. We have agency. We have the ability to turn intention into action. And it’s like the bards say: if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

This is why it’s significant when you say things like “I don’t go outside all that much, even if that would solve most of my problems.” That’s a choice you’re making. You are choosing to keep your problems, rather than to confront them and solve them. You are choosing to hold onto a one-sided attraction, rather than to let it go and to seek out another. You are choosing to believe that nothing matters. But you can choose otherwise. You can choose to make things matter, to create meaning, to imbue significance on everything anything. You can choose to hold on to someone for no reason other than you think it makes you special and significant to do so… or you can choose to let go of the pain and find someone who will love you the way you want.

But you have to choose and take responsibility for that choice, with everything that means.

It’s all up to you.

Good luck.