Love is not only blind – it is destructive. It does not fit nicely into an orderly life, or bend to our plans and desires. It instead strips us naked and tosses us around helplessly. We awaken like a shipwrecked sailor against the rocky shores of pain and turmoil. We are left barely alive, grasping to a wrecked piece of meaning in an ocean of meaninglessness…

Yet this is what makes love powerful. Love is one of the most destructive forces we are likely to encounter in our daily modern lives. Today we mistakenly believe that love is a trite, invented concept – a construct that doesn’t truly exist. We bumble to our lovers, we are red-faced and embarrassed to say the words. Today it is almost taboo to say, “I love you.” In our cynical, postmodern culture we believe we are beyond simple binaries as love and hate.

For us, in all our sophistication, the fact that we are afraid or need to preface the words (e.g. “this is gonna be cheesy, and who knows what this even means, and … But I love you”) indicates that we believe in love more than ever. Our snide remarks do not weaken its power, but in fact strengthen it. All our deconstruction of love and ironic attitudes betray a desire to distance ourselves from it; a desire which is born of fear, and true belief. Making fun of love, or rolling our eyes at the idea is a defense mechanism. It doesn’t stop one from believing it. Our humor and derision hides the fact that it still holds power over us. We can barely even utter the words!

We are a society obsessed with hedonistic self-fulfillment and material success – ‘find yourself!’, ‘be all you can be!’, ‘live your life to the fullest!’ and so forth. In this cultural environment, love is not only an obstacle, but an emotionally destructive force. The sacrifice of our own life plans, our own sense of self, and all else we may endure is nearly unbearable. The very word we use to describe the onset of love is ‘falling’, and this is no accident. It is a scary and exhilarating fall – to put oneself into the hands of another, naked as it were and completely open to the destruction of the ego.

Today this is terrifying for us, for it may interrupt our goals, or our narcissistic sense of self. Hence the rise of OkCupid and other dating sites, and similar services – the idea that you can take the ‘fall’ out of love, tame it, and make it safe. Even our ‘hookup’ culture hides a deep fear of the commitment and sacrifice required for love. But to make love safe, to remove the mortal danger it presents is to destroy what makes it love. You cannot love without falling, and you cannot fall without endangering yourself. It is the very act of putting all your faith into another human being that makes love what it is. And love is despotic; one cannot be a little bit in love. Hookup culture therefore betrays a fear by guaranteeing minimal emotional attachment and advocating a wait-and-see approach. Love does not wait and see, it projects itself to the very end. For love to be true one must be willing to go to that end to see the person and envision an eternity with them.

Such a concept is scary to us in our post-ideological age. However our “post-ideology” actually represents a deeply entrenched ideology: in our disregard for love we actually believe it whole-heartedly; the disregard betrays a desire to distance ourselves from it out of fear. Not only is love real to us post-modern ‘cynics,’ but we are simultaneously afraid of it; most afraid, yet most in need. Despite all the danger it presents to one’s life plans, and one’s ego, I say we ought to allow ourselves to fall, to disregard our obsession with safety, and to take the mortal yet vital plunge. Often the most dangerous life-threatening things are also those that make us feel most alive. Fuck your own life; let it be ruined by one big love! Danger is life affirming. Amor vincit omnia: “love conquers all.”

Wyatt Negrini is a U3 Philosophy major. He can be reached at wyatt.negrini@mail.mcgill.ca.

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No, you won’t. We live and die by the dice. Society is the safest it’s ever been and we’re the saddest we’ve ever been; maybe they’re related. You see, surviving adversity is something which gives us strength. When there is no existential risk, we feel fake, like everything we do is unreal, and yet we’re still insecure because we still know we will die. Shhh! Don’t say that!

Look at how skillfully we have removed death from all aspects of our culture. Most of us live in cities, far from the natural world; we are removed from the birth/death cycle of animals. We eat meat, but I doubt a single reader has killed their own meal. Death is on the plate; life feeds off the death of other life. Vegetarians too, are often far removed from, or unaware of, where their food is grown. We are detached from the things which sustain us, and from our final end. We have sterilized our world. We have sterilized our sex. We hide our defecation, we hide the soil and remove the visual reminder of where our food comes from. We do all this to avoid our corpo-reality: the fact that we are all merely physical beings with a finite lifespan.

Despite these efforts, however, we are more insecure and obsessed with danger and mortality than any other culture. Like sexual repression, you cannot eliminate or repress the reality of death and danger. Our news and our media allow us to gorge on images of death while simultaneously keeping us warm, safe, and far away from them. We are sterilized,  zero-tolerance playgrounds where play is too violent, and Saw movies. With wide eyes we stare at the screen in bloodlust, but we cringe at having to squish an insect or kill a mouse. We cheer as UFC fighters pummel each other, but few of us have ever been in a real fight.

We talk a lot about love, but we are starving for it. Few of us are willing to take the risk of rejection, let’s make love safe instead! Matchmaking services abound, promising to find you your perfect soulmate, hassle and risk-free. We Facebook stalk people we’d be mortified to say hello to in real life. But love for another is born out of risk, the risk of giving oneself entirely to another human being, and the possibility of being rejected. True love exists as faith, the faith that the other will return the same sentiment, though they may not. When we love we put our very core and sense of self at risk, yet requited love is one of life’s greatest affirmations. Life’s most rewarding pleasure has the potential to be its most destructive too.

Sorry, my friends. There is no safe love and there is no safe life. Life and love, to be lived, must be lived dangerously, as Nietzsche said. I’m not advocating that we dismantle our justice system or destroy the social construct, but I am advocating a slight relaxation on our obsession with safety and risk reduction. Take some risks, fall in love, have an argument, hell, maybe even get into a fight or two! Our society is the safest it’s ever been and yet we cry.

Remember that we own nothing, and no one owns us. We are here on borrowed time, all of us. Everything is a rental, even your mind and body, so use them! Go and have some fun, take some risks, and create something. Ask out the person you like, risk rejection. Apply for that internship abroad, risk loneliness and homesickness. Take that extra course, risk stress. Write that shitty poem, risk a loss of pride. As an athlete, push for that extra second, risk pain. But most of all, take risks and ignore the sirens of safety that preach caution. We are all on death row, every single one of us, each waiting for the day our name is called. When your number is called, what will you have to show for it? The ultimate destination will be reached my friends – the only question is, how will you reach it?

Wyatt Negrini is a U2 Philosophy major. He can be reached at wyatt.negrini@mail.mcgill.ca.

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