I was growing up in a very patriarchal family with a lot of girls. To give you a feeling of what we are speaking about – there always was a fight for who is honoured to bring a glass of water to the head of the family – dad. Nothing is more important than making the man happy. A woman's happiness comes from being able to make the man happy.

The career path I was trained for – successful marriage which pretty much means he is rich and I never need to work. The instructions were approximately the following: be canonically attractive, ex-model is a big plus, start dating a rich guy, make him marry you, give birth to several kids asap (so he won’t leave you), dedicate your life to staying canonically attractive and making him happy. You can also spend time on self-development but only if it makes your man happy (e.g. learn pole dance which i tried but it is so god damn painful).

And believe me or not I tried to make this happen. I really tried. Especially at a very young age. There are two issues with the career of the Disney Princess:

1. It is not easy, one needs a lot of effort and investments, and dedication, and what not. Because competition is very high and frustration from failures is very real.

2. It says nothing about love.

My parents taught me that there is no such thing as ‘love’ between men and women. People tell each other I love you but they do not mean it. There is love of parents to kids and kids to parents. But there is no long lasting love in couples. Marriage is a career: the more you invest, the more you get; the less lucky you are, the more effort you need.

I didn’t take this career path not because of the rational choice, but first of all because I was incredibly bad at it. I was thinking all the time “well, but how does it make me feel?” and this was against “the rules” because it doesn’t matter what you feel. The only thing that matters is the result: did you get the successful marriage or not.

The only way to survive in a world where it doesn’t matter what you feel – is to feel nothing. And no kidding – this can be a reasonable rational decision if the main objective is a canonical successful life. But what if there is something else behind all these successful pictures?

When you start feeling – most of the time you feel pain. Because the world is made of pain and people treat each other most of the time as complete shit (imo). But sometimes, not too often but sometimes, you also feel good things, such as gentleness, care, or love. Which feels amazing but almost always ends up bad. People got used to being treated as shit. When one expresses gentleness, care, and love towards them – most people freak out. Because they do not know what to do with it. And because it touches the heart. And the pain after your heart has been touched is way more real.

There are three ways how the couples are made:

1. Rationally assembled – either organized by families or by men and women independently following the objective of successful marriage.

2. By serving each other's traumas and pains.

3. By conscious choice of going for love with an open heart while realizing that it might also mean meeting a lot of pain and taking full responsibility for it.

I’ve briefly described the perspective of the first approach in the beginning of this essay, the only thing to add is that there is no thing like ‘broken heart’ in this story. As long as you are together – you are completely fine and nothing else matters. The problem is if you break up. And here it’s very different for men and women. For women – it’s pretty much the end of the world because the whole game is that she is young and pretty. Just being pretty is not enough. Even if she looks like she is 20 but she is 35 – it doesn’t count. So the game is to make it impossible to divorce. It just should be so expensive and so problematic that the man will never go for it (even if he promises that he will divorce to all his other women).

Now, when we are done with organized marriages, let’s look at other ways how people self-organize into couples.

Modern people often evolve in relationships of five: him, her, his therapist, her therapist, and their common therapist. The idea is as follows: two people ‘decided’ to be together because they fit each other’s traumas, but to decrease the pain from it – they put several therapists in between.

And this is a wonderful ride! For several reasons: first, we have so many traumas that it’s enough to exchange traumas with other people for dozens and dozens of years. Second, it is quite a gamified process as we can proceed from one trauma to another trauma while crossing out the previous trauma. So we are traveling through a trauma roadmap and it feels like a positive traction which fits our modern brains trained for infinite self-improvement.

This usually goes with ‘I want’, ‘I need’ and overall is a very ego-driven process. It’s like I have my list of needs that my partner needs to fit and I will do my best (or not my best) to fit their list of needs. And we will work a lot on our relationships, talk a lot about our relationships, which mostly means talking about what I want and what I need and your performance in satisfying my wants and needs.

These relations usually last for years but not forever. The reason is that to continue these relationships, two people need to have traumas that both of them are interested in playing with. But the bank of traumas is not endless and they are quite diverse meaning that overlap can be not that large. And playing the same traumas again and again is (a) boring (b) hard because the therapist will require progress.

What happens when the relationships between our traumas end?

There are two approaches: very happy and very unhappy. One of them is defined by the mind, another one is defined by the ego. The choice presumably depends on the particular traumas.

The very happy outcome is that we were incredibly happy together, made each other grow and be a better person, and now we have organically arrived to the point of being incredibly happy separately. So this is like ‘thank you for your work, it was nice being colleagues with you, let me know if i ever can be of any help’. This works if both sides are happy to break up.

But what if one side is happy to break up while another side hasn’t got their returns on investment yet? Then it is a huge ego pain. Because we agreed, I worked hard, I invested a lot, and you have just wasted my life, time, and resources and yalla yalla.

Now I will say something that most people will not agree with: serving each others’ traumas, even if for years, has nothing to do with love.

What if we go for love?

First of all, most people won’t play this game with you. Love is a bit not a perfect fit for the world as is. For the world, for the systems, love is very inconvenient and annoying because it makes people hard to manage. And for people, love is a bit of an alien because this is the narrative the world provides us with.

The narrative is that love is a very mysterious and dangerous creature and not completely clear what it is, where it is, why it happens, does it even exist. And our brains are trained to pursue familiar and ‘safe’ objectives. Following the love is like following the alien you’ve just met on the street: where will it take you? Will it put you to the spaceship and take you away forever? How will it treat you? Will it eat you?

Following love is blind trust (exactly like following the alien). The question is blind trust to whom? I would say… the God and yourself (which is the same in fact). But maybe blind trust to something else. I have no clue what I am speaking about.

The really funny thing is that most people (maybe even all people, I am not sure) know exactly what love is and have experienced it in their life. The most common example is how people describe the last hour before death. They mostly say that they understand that all things they thought mattered didn’t really matter and they just felt a lot of love for the world and people they liked, and people they didn’t like, people they knew, and people they didn’t know.

Another shared feeling is what people feel when they see their baby for the first time. This love is very quickly kidnapped by ego, but first moments people usually describe the feeling of unconditional pure love.

And the last ‘learning’ about love is some early feelings that we experience at the age of 10, 12, 14, I don’t know. Adults usually tell kids that you know nothing about love, you know nothing about life, you are a kid and your feelings are toy-feelings. But the truth is that those ‘toy-feelings’ are the closest to ‘the love’.

Before I start the last section of this essay, I want to point out that I am just expressing my perspective. I am not saying that this is the right worldview and do not claim to be 100% sure that the world works like this. It’s just my intuition about the world.

So what is love… well.. Love is some thin energy traveling among people’s hearts for no reason. Or well.. Maybe for the reason of the heart being open. Like the wind travels through the open window in a house, love travels through the open heart in a human being. The objective of love is love. The goal of love is love. The outcome of love is love. There is no progress, no evolution, no improvement. Love is just happening again, and again, and again, and again. That’s it.

Love is not guaranteed. Me feeling love to you doesn’t mean I will feel love to you even the next moment. Love is a blind trust. Therapists know nothing about love. Science knows nothing about love. Religion knows nothing about love. But every single person on the earth has experienced love at least for several moments in their life. And they know it.

You probably won’t believe me, but there is no pain in love. Pain comes from ego, from conditions not being met, desires not being satisfied, expectations not being fulfilled, goals not being achieved. Love is just ‘vibing’ in one’s heart because the heart is open. Love to another human being is the touch of my own love in the heart and their own love in the heart for no particular reason, just because the hearts are open.

The goal of love is love. What can be broken is the armor of the heart. We think the heart is broken and we feel pain when the armor of the heart is broken. But if there is no armor and nothing to be broken, the heart is just vibing.

Well… love is a blind trust, it has no guarantees and no control. It just happens when the heart is open and it is actually a very gentle and safe substance that has nothing to do with pain and fear.

However the question is: can one build relationships based on love? The answer is: I think so, but I am not sure, and I didn’t succeed so far. But I will try as long as I am alive and if one day I understand something about it – I will write you another essay :)

But if I was imagining what these relationships might look like… I would imagine something like this: I love you for who you are, the best thing in you is you, the thing i like most of all in you is you, my favourite thing to do with you is being with you, my favourite thing to do to you is whatever is able to genuinely touch your heart and make your human part feel good.