Modern Romanticism

Some might hear or read the word “useless” as inherently having a negative connotation. Instead, one ought to refer to its meaning as having more of a neutral tone. There isn’t anything positive nor negative about what’s useless or even useful, especially in regards to where these words are often applied. If there is one who is labelled useless under the second label of them being impractical with their actions, it’s perhaps because of their idealistic and rebellious instinct against practicality. However, when it comes to a thing like love, it’s always with impractical aspects about it. One protects a loved one even if self-preservation appears to be the most “rational” choice. One loves another individual enough to sacrifice for them, even if survival might be the sole thing that appears to matter for the group.

What we describe to be practical is indeed everything useful. Whereas what’s impractical ought to be considered useless. Some invention that’s still in its experimental phase will not be mass produced and marketed among the masses without extensive testwork. This invention is therefore more of a useless thing than a useful thing. Its errors and other areas that require tweaking bring it down more on the scale that is labelled “useless” over the other side of the same scale that’s labelled “useful”. As in, it has a much higher chance to fail than to succeed in whatever it was given purpose to do. We can compare love to an invention that’s still in its experimental phase because love is always a least comprehensive ideal. At the same time, it’s always an ideal on its own. It’s never a thing of realism, for that’s the place of human emotions. We feel what’s real to us, as we grieve when we are alone to soak in those emotions. Also, in grief, we are constantly trying to make sense of things. Grief steers us into disorder, meaning that healing comes after we recognize what still remains being ourselves and the memories of who we lost. But when we love, we are not feeling simply what we are feeling. In love, we are also feeling what the other person is feeling. This disconnection from just ourselves, to another person, is what tends to confuse us through the feelings that are indeed involved. It perhaps shares the same confusion as grief because as people grieve when they still love, people love because they are willing to sacrifice of themselves what’s now less important. In love, we share consciousnesses with someone else. Empathy is a major part of this development, and the confusion is all the more evident when we are not merely experiencing this part of our life by ourselves. We are experiencing it with someone else, and the combination of two people’s consciousnesses allows us to link self-preservation with someone else’s preservation as if it were the same thing.

Love has its useless elements, especially when it comes to its constant references to individuals. An individual loves another individual, making commitment in such a duo of a relationship to always involve fixation. One individual to another means that such a pair see each other as a complete separation from whatever surface-level connection that might be made from one or the other to things like culture, race, gender, etc. To either towards the other, their preciousness is deemed a strict fixation. For if they were still strangers to each other, they’d be able to address them for details related to strangers. As love sees past numbers, meaning that it doesn’t require a certain amount for itself to make contentment possible, it will instead see the other individual as having more in common than in what’s different. There is sameness, through love, because it makes up the term “attachment”. People grieve from breakups and from death only because the love still remains. Love is undying. To its inherent place with the term “attachment”, it doesn’t hold a nature for dismissal when nothing about it can be consumed nor spent.

We’d not spend who is loved, as we’d not consume who is loved. Even if we speak the words, “I love this meal,” it has to be a statement directed at whoever made the meal. The meal was not prepared on its own. The meal was prepared by someone who loves us and wants us to remain as we are fed and met with other basic necessities. A person will not starve if they’re loved. A mother is a mother when they feed their young what they sacrifice of what will be spent or be consumed to keep their beloved children from disappearance. It is only for those we love that we will be willing to sacrifice for the sake of keeping alive those who can’t be lost. In there lies the difference between “sacrifice” and “loss”. In self-preservation, a person deems themselves most important to not disappear. If a person sacrifices what they have, even if it’s only a little amount of it, it’s because they view this other person in need of being preserved.

Love’s uselessness is because we won’t be willing to spend nor get rid of those who we love because their presence matters to us. We cannot legitimately associate a number to what another person means to us as that will always be the act of limiting their meaning. We cannot accurately say “how much” a person means to us, because out of all the words that exist in all human languages, no low nor high number nor any specific number of those words can describe either as plainly or as eloquently what fulfillment their presence gives.