“Forever romance” with solely one person is really hard to live up to forever, although this type of exclusiveness is highly prized and romanticized in the arts and in modern societies. Due to our intelligent and curious nature, humans are instinctively promiscuous, polygamous, and serially monogamous. The peak of infatuation/attraction, where it sickens you to even think about someone else in place of your lover, lasts about maybe two years or more before it slowly wears down– unless you have this awesome ability to keep falling in love with the same person over and over again all the time– which is possible, but super hard to do sometimes when there are billions of dudes and chicks walking around the world; each carrying different and mysterious attributes and interests.
You can fall in love/be infatuated with anything for god sakes– anything that walks, moves, doesn’t move or doesn’t even exist in our physical world. If you ever hear someone claim, “Well, I’ve loved only one person my entire life and I still love him/her” Great, clap your hands and congratulate them. It’s unrequited romance, and they’re still trying to win a heart.
This is heated infatuation here, like drugs, just another type of obsession while your body is still not-too-old, and hormones are still raging. It’s different from familial love, care, and friendship which lasts much longer, and becomes primal when you’re old. Infatuations are difficult to deal with, but they’re so natural and innate, they lead to procreation.
Maybe these rules of modern day society, these recent visions of nuclear families, are not in line with human nature. “Cheating” among couples, high divorce rates, suppression of desires, or unhappy marriages; could this phase in modern society just be another natural experiment? Our closest living relatives, primates, live in polygamous social groups and so did nomadic groups of our early human ancestors before the onset of agriculture; which brought about stability, money, property, ownership, and an even greater fear of losing them. Yet still, ~84% of humans currently live in polygamous societies (BBC).
This modern society that we’re living in is temporary, and will dissipate in a matter of time, just like the thousands of civilizations that came before us. However, the traditions and practices that we’ve currently been born into is unlikely to change too drastically over our lifetime. Nevertheless, we will keep being curious and needy from time to time, and will remain as what we really are biologically. Just Primitive. Horny. Humans.
And that’s pretty literal.
Samasya Tapasya 