Complaint #023: Romance

Single men should not listen to love songs. Occasionally, between the time that I'm watching football, drinking beer, stroking my enormous beard, hunting and slaughtering various animals (with my bare hands), and eating their roasted carcasses, I get the time to listen to music. Approximately 99.997% of music is about romantic love. So, when I was listening to some Beatles this past week, I realized single men should not listen to love songs.

Let me explain how my brain works (I don't know how others' brains work, so I'm putting this in my terms, feel free to reply below to tell me how crazy I am). I feel two levels of my brain working at a time: the higher level, logical brain function and the lower level, emotional brain function. I try to pride myself on being fairly dominated by the logical level of my brain. This level of my brain knows I should be content even in my singleness, and even though having a companion is desired, it is not necessary. My lower level brain function is dumber than a lemming. It continually craves companionship and cannot stop thinking about my previous romantic relationship opportunities and tries to figure out how to fix them. Just writing that makes me feel like a creeper, but I am unable to shut off this function of my brain. What makes this worse is that my higher brain level realizes anything that is forced, in the realm of romance, ruins the beauty of romance so it is content to just wait until love befalls me. The lower level brain function will have nothing to do with this and wants to create love out of anything.

I've scientifically determined that the time at which I have the highest probability of finding true romantic love is the instant I can convince my entire mind that I don't need it. This time, however, is likely off in the distant future. eBay (which I barely even use anymore) and Amazon feel the need to email me every day to remind me that I need to buy stuff for Valentine's Day. What am I going to buy and for whom? There isn't an "I'm a pathetic single, stop emailing me about Valentine's Day" button; I've checked. Valentine's Day is only a few days off, so that'll pass. Then I've got music. I can't not listen to music. No matter how hard I try, I can't avoid music that has a love theme. But let's say that I can, I still won't be able to avoid happy people. Happy couples are everywhere! Let me say something to all the happily-in-love people in my audience: your happiness fills us single people with the urge to drown puppies. You people should be instantly transported to a separate universe where people are happy and in love so all the single people can go through life being content with their single lives instead of being continually reminded of how pathetically single they are. The last thing I'll point out (and a submission for my candidacy as president of the tautology club) is that beautiful women are beautiful. Women shouldn't be so attractive so that I don't realize they're not dating me.

So what is my advice? How should I and others cope with this? Name the animals. I know, it isn't the advice you were expecting, but it's Biblical: Adam, before he ate some fruit and destroyed humanity, before sin had even entered the world, during the time where he could hang out with God any time he wanted, felt incomplete without a physical companion. When he brought this to God, what did God do? Did God create Eve? Nope. He told Adam to name all the animals. This actually makes sense, though, because he had to work to figure out what his perfect companion would be, and he realized it wasn't a zebra or a gecko. As such, we need to work to find who will be our perfect companion. What does this mean for me? What does it mean for you? I don't know, but when you feel you need a significant other, remind yourself that you first need to name the animals. That, and don't listen to love songs.

^*Let me give attribution to Donald Miller for that last paragraph which I essentially stole from him.