It is all started in this semester when almost all the courses I took has a word ‘critical’ as the pre-modifier of the courses name. Firstly, I did not really like these courses for they ‘force’ me to keep questioning and thinking over everything. That was some kind of madness!
Since it is inevitable for me to run away from these courses, I started trying to like these courses instead. It turns out that I like these ‘critical’ things for it is substantially important skill in human’s life—or at least in my life.
I realized that all the media; television, radio, newspapers, magazines, internet, and all of other media—by using discourse—are trying to construct the reality concerning things. Because of I was too lazy to even think, I succumbed to all the constructionists ideas and conceptions about reality. That was how I turned into a shallow and superficial person incapable of thinking deeply.
In the last previous days, I have been thinking over the term ‘relationship’. Although it is a kind of trifles, I find that there is a fatal error in the construction of relationship discourse by the media—including narratives all this time.
One of the ‘fatal errors’ is Plato’s The Symposium. In his writing, Plato says that according to Greek Mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs, and a head with two faces. Zeus—who fears their power—split them into two separate beings, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.
This excerpt is indeed romantic and somehow cute or something; but it proves that even since centuries ago, there is a false construction that human relationship is consist of a pair of people who are needy and desperate, then cling to each other because they are destined to be so. It is not a shocking fact if then almost all of romance stories portray relationship or love as a quest for finding somebody else to be complete.
The question is: is it really true that we are incomplete by being alone?
Well… I did think so.
In my previous relationships, I thought that my girlfriend was the one who fulfilled me; who complemented me; and the one who filled the void in me. That was when I started being needy and desperate. Interestingly, my girlfriend thought so as well. All the relationships in my life have been a co-dependent relationship of two dysfunctional needy and desperate people who are incapable of independence.
The point is that I have to be capable of happy by myself, and only then, I can come together with another to create a great entity which is greater than the sum of the each of us.
If you are now sitting and reading this post alone, feeling lonely and lack of something, and then you start to think, “if only I had someone or love to re-kindle the little spark of my dark heart, I would be happy and complete”, you are indeed needy and desperate. If you are needy and desperate, the person you will probably attract is either: 1) another needy and desperate person; or 2) nobody.
If you think that there might be someone who will finally complete you—which it will—you will never actually happy for your relationship will most likely turn to be sour, before it ends—or it will stay sour for eternity. Trust me!
The thing is that there is nothing that anyone in this world can offer me what I cannot offer myself. I am not saying that I do not need anybody else. Of course I need teachers to teach me, I need farmers to plant my rice and vegetables—I don’t like vegetables, but let me just mention it—or many more people. I am saying that the ‘need’ here is the psychological need; the feel that there is a void in my ego that need filling.
Let’s be happy by ourselves. Let’s be complete… and after that, let’s be happy together.
This is not entirely my idea; this writing is based on some books and sites I read. There is no such thing as my completely work.