Love, Theoretically: A Creative Rant

*I feel it’s very important to say this isn’t a poem, because it violates a lot of things I think are important to poetry. It’s not quite as bad as “instagram poetry,” but it’s not intentionally formed as a poem should be. So I’m calling it a creative rant of social commentary with line breaks.*

Embracing our captivity, we wait

for our one and only,

taking it for granted that our life’s mission

is to find romantic love,

Holding it above career and the self

without questioning our enslavement

to natural selection and the biological need 

for procreation.

It colors entertainment in varying shades,

historically accepted as the stuff of novels and stories,

dramatizing a concept of heavy skepticism 

but persistent,

almost unconscious,

faith.

Or obsession,

since we insist on finding romance

in platonic relationships,

in the glances from innocent subjects,

in the kindness of strangers,

in the romanticized recollections of the past.

Despite all the litter of life,

on this march to our deaths,

we deem it so important to have a travel companion.

We find it odd when a life hasn’t experienced

this abstraction.

We stack on layers of sadness 

onto old maidens,

because a life isn’t worth living if

they haven’t found their One Person.

It’s a Fact of Life.

We call it so 

despite all Facts of Life being

fictions of relativity and theory.

And yet

Despite its omniscience,

we still wait. 

A societal and cultural insistence on passive,

selfish love,

forming ourselves into a product

in order to be loved

rather than to love.