What if Love Comes With a Sell-by Date?

Nowadays, it appears as though love is such a difficult emotion to contain.

Just look around you. Either someone has their heart ripped to pieces or is being dumped by the person they believed at first to be their partner for life. It is as though each time you blink, another love story has reached its bitter end.

That raises the question: does love come with a sell-by date?

Is there some sort of unanticipated internal clock that dictates how long it stays around?

When you wake up right beside the person you have spent days, weeks, and months with and do not feel any deep affection towards them, has love reached its best-by date?

Is there a more profound connection between the duration of a relationship and an individual’s lifespan?

How can we measure and calculate how this mixed bag of choices and feelings will endure? What if it is calculated based on one’s upbringing?

How can we tell whether or not we should abort the relationship before we are aborted?

How can we keep this feeling of love to stay around longer if we are clueless about its mechanics?

Love is one of those areas of life full of conspiracy and controversies. Because love is a term with many definitions, it is not surprising that everyone has their own perspectives on what love actually means to them.

All we know is that there is more to love than just a feeling of a strong attraction and emotional attachment.

Love is not as straightforward as we want it to be. Love is not easy to comprehend.

The process of finding love can be a pain in the ass. Once we find it, we struggle to keep it. However, it is necessary and worthwhile.

When the sparks of love come to life, you have a nervous feeling in your stomach. Instead of running through a flower field, you want to slow down the pace like you are in a slow-motion film while letting the wind brush your hair better than your hairbrush at home and listening to relationship-based songs by Taylor Swift in the background.

When a love story comes to a close, there is nothing you want to do more than shrink into yourself, like the death of a star. You want to cry yourself a river, and you desire to find answers to the why and how.

However, what if love is intended to function this way by nature? What if every love comes with a best-before date, pre-printed into its place in your heart, and when the time is up, the time is up?

What are the odds that love is pre-established by a force of nature that we will never comprehend?

What are the chances that we will one day discover the forces that dictate the mechanics of love?

What if love is genuinely beyond our control?

What if one day we uncover a method to sustain love for a longer duration? Like our parents and their parents before them?

What if love never dies?

What if we can control and foresee love?

What if love is all our parents taught us from their pre-bedtime storybooks?

What is love even?

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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