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May 25, 2017

Why We All Need to be Hopeless Romantics.

Being a hopeless romantic is worthwhile.

We all feel things. We all have deeply rooted passions and longings that rest at the very core of our beings, and I, for one, want to live in accordance with these things—live out my truest nature and fully express my most fundamental impulses.

This is not possible when we are confined to the cultural narrative, which is to say when we succumb to the slew of “shoulds” that society attempts to impose upon us. Wherever there is “should,” as in you should do this or that—you should go to school, you should get so-and-so job, you should date this or that person—then we lose our sense of personal autonomy as well as our sense of romanticism.

Being hopelessly romantic implies being free of “should,” for our emotional bodies must be able to flow freely and without inhibition.

We sat on a bench, with glazed eyes and heavy spirits, on an early evening at the dawning of spring.

That holy scent of the burgeoning season surrounded us, as if it had been enduring patiently beneath winter with a smile on its face—eagerly waiting for its own blossoming.

It had been a lovely evening between the two of us, one filled with laughs, dimpled smiles, calming stares, light brushes of our skin, and about a million and a half other subtleties that go far beyond words.

It would, perhaps, be one of the last times I would see her, or at least one of the last times I would see her like this—giving all of ourselves to each other, holding space for one another, being fully there for each other. That energy would disappear into the ethos not long after this, but, in that moment, our ignorance was our bliss, and we certainly made the most of it.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

Her legs lay across mine, my arm circled around her waist and resting on her hip.

I was leaning somewhat below her, so I was looking up at her as she spoke, the sun setting to the far left of her shining hair. Her face was lightly shadowed, but her eyes remained glowing—glowing with a vibrancy and power that has been burned into my imagination ever since.

“You. This. Now.” I replied.

The “should” kills everything, our love included.

If there were any impositions upon this moment, any place we felt we had to be, anything we felt we needed to do, any obligation we had waiting in the wings of our minds—creeping into our consciousness like a virus, then we would not have embodied our time together, as limited as that time may have been.

The romantic does not feel compelled in any which direction other than the here and now, the felt presence of immediate experience. Everything else is background noise. It all pales in comparison to our love.

When we let go of all inward hindrance, all psychological constraint, all of our conditioning and cultural programming, then what is left?

Ourselves. Our truest and most authentic selves. Our most essential feelings. Our most heartfelt longings. Our deepest passions and desires, and surely that is all that existed between me and her in that particular flash of the vast infinitude of time and space.

“This is all that matters,” I remember exclaiming. “F*ck tomorrow.”

She leaned toward me, carrying that latent vibrancy along with her, and kissed me with the sheer intensity of the lioness that rested inside of her. Fiery, impassioned, explosive. She kissed me fiercely, with the entirety of her being, and I could do nothing but let myself be taken by her, taken away to some far away land where everything was free and beautiful.

It was incredible.

There were no constructs here, no boundaries, no barriers, no hurdles stopping us from expressing ourselves most fully or detaching us from the felt presence of immediate experience. We were living in the moment, and such is the essential characteristic of the archetypal romantic.

So, being hopelessly romantic doesn’t necessarily imply standing in the rain with a boombox over our heads outside of our ex’s apartment (though, of course, nothing is off the table). Rather, it entails being aligned with the field of our most rooted emotions, being in accordance with our most fundamental impulses, and not letting the world tell us we should be otherwise.

We must feel our way through our lives, rather than merely think our way through. To be connected with that which is felt—the field of our emotions, our deeper impulses—is to embrace what makes us human, and surely the fruits reaped are ever so sweet.

It is only with this quality of internal freedom that love may come to flower; and, surely, the flowering of love is why we are here.

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Author: Samuel Kronen
Image: Jacob Ufkes/Unsplash
Editor: Leah Sugerman

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