Who Taught You What Love is ?

Are you thinking about love?

What a painfully obvious question to ask on Valentine’s Day.

Of course you are. Everyone is.

The world is practically synchronized to it, thinking, yearning, crying, complaining about the most controversial word in any dictionary: LOVE.

So here’s the real question.

Are you a LOVER or Are you a PERFORMER ?

Before arriving at conclusion to this question, here is a thought, driven by observation (or maybe just my biased rant). It increasingly feels as though many young men and women today are not just rejecting love, but quietly running away from it. Almost as if they are choosing a LIFE MINUS LOVE ,removing LOVE from the equation before it has the chance to dominate, disappoint, or break them. The very emotion that is supposed to be exciting, life-giving, the whole point of being human and giving oneself the purpose to live, now feels threatening. It feels like something that will break you, consume you, rearrange your future in ways you cannot control. So people step back. Not loudly. Not rebelliously. Just cautiously. It is almost like a reverse pandemic, love is not spreading; it is slowly de-spreading.

The word love sounds grand. Sacred. Poetic. But the lived experience of it feels exhausting.

Of course, the elders, the advisers ,the self-appointed moral science teachers of society have their explanations ready. They begin by cursing millennials and Gen Z, dismissing this generation as dramatic. To them this is Arrogance. Fear of commitment. Too much freedom. Too many choices. Too much education. Too much ego. Too much exposure. Too many opinions. In their version, society is falling apart because no one listens anymore. It is a convenient explanation. But if that explanation is kept aside for a moment, another possibility appears.

BORROWED EXPECTATIONS, ORIGINAL EXHAUSTION -

What if people are not running away from love itself, but from the "script" attached to it?

And what exactly is this script? Who writes it, who approves it, who slips it into our hands without ever saying, “By the way, this is only one version”? It arrives quietly, long before emotions are clear, long before adulthood demands answers.

Through films that teach us what longing should look like. Through families that drop hints about “settling down.” Through culture that celebrates certain unions and quietly disapproves others. Through patriarchy that teaches adjustment before desire. Through social media that shows us how love must be announced, defended, endured. Even through the economy that packages love into rings, dinners, gifts anniversaries, and seasons of sale. The script is subtle, but it is thorough.

And most of them today stand victims of this very script. Quietly suffering with not completely realizing how the script messed with their existence in subtle ways.

It tells us what love must look like, how it must progress, what it must tolerate, what it must prove.

And by the time adulthood catches up, love doesn’t arrive gently, it arrives with PRESSURE. Suddenly it is time. Suddenly it is serious. Suddenly it must be defined. And that is when fear shows up first, and one convinces oneself, “Maybe love is not for me"... Not because love is terrifying by nature, but because the foundation underneath, it was never explored, it was just installed. The package was already prepared: this is love, this is commitment, this is happiness, this is success. You don’t remember choosing it. You don’t remember questioning it. It simply feels “normal.”

And when something inside you resists, when confusion replaces excitement, when love feels heavier than it should, the conclusion is personal failure. One assume something is wrong with oneself. You don’t see the script operating. You don’t see how the truth about love was handed over long before you could search for your own. And maybe that quiet inheritance, that unnoticed conditioning, is what slowly turns into exhaustion.

Not a rejection of love, but a fatigue from carrying a version that was never truly yours.

So LOVE - that supposedly is the most beautiful feeling in the world is no longer something we simply experience. It has become some thing that we perform. And, Perhaps that is the silent irony the modern world, both young and old is quietly suffering from.

Like we question the cracks in the walls, but never the foundation that was quietly laid before we even knew we were standing on the building.

Borrowed Thoughts, Borrowed Feelings

Recently, I was listening to one of my favorite writer and thinker, Arundhati Roy. She said something that refuses to leave the mind. She spoke about how human beings today are forced to process an unnatural volume of information. So many voices. So many opinions. So many ready-made truths. It has become difficult, she said, to even recognize one’s own thoughts.

To know what is truly yours and what quietly entered through repetition from media and internet. Are those feelings really yours? Or did they slip in from somewhere between a Reels - scroll and a headline?

When the noise is constant, silence becomes rare. And without silence, how does anyone locate an original voice?

And this is precisely where love turns into performance. Because when thoughts are influenced, emotions are influenced too. Love no longer grows slowly in private spaces; it is shaped in public view.

It is observed, compared, rated, narrated. From childhood, examples are everywhere, how love must look, how it must progress, what it must prove. Social media does not just show love; it sets standards . The Marketing economy does not just benefit from love; it packages and sells it. In such an environment, LOVE BECOMES MEASURABLE, by milestones, by announcements, by visible loyalty, and a constant posturing echoing, hey this is how love should look like! The pressure is no longer to feel deeply, but to express correctly. And when expression becomes more important than experience, performance naturally takes over. It becomes hard to tell where authenticity ends and imitation begins.

In a world constantly watching, love learns to act before it learns to exist.

A Plot twist and an U - turn :

So, going back to the question we began with - Are you a LOVER or a PERFORMER ?

Is love performance?

Maybe. Maybe it always was. Maybe nothing new is happening and we (or maybe just me) are being dramatic. Even before the internet, before reels and captions people performed love. They wrote letters knowing someone would read them. They built monuments for a dead lover knowing someone would see them and weep. They fasted, waited, sacrificed, promised in public. Even gods in mythology needed witnesses.

Love has never been silent. It has always wanted an audience. May be that performance is a assurance that everyone has a story to tell, that they belong somewhere.

Maybe what we are calling performance today is just visibility. Love has always wanted to be seen. It has always needed gestures. A ring is a performance. A wedding is the biggest performance. Announcing commitment is a performance. Even saying “I’ll stay” is a performance. Without expression, love becomes private imagination. And humans don’t survive on imagination alone. We need symbols. We need rituals. We need something that says, “This is real.”

So maybe performance is not the enemy. Maybe unconscious performance is. Maybe the problem is not that we perform love, but that we don’t know when we are performing someone else’s version of it. There is nothing wrong in borrowing what works. There is nothing wrong in learning from what we see.

After all in loveless, cruel societies, crumbs of love here and there even though is performative is a blessing to starving men and women who are witness to only hate, indifference and apathy. Influence is not evil. The internet is not going away. AI is not switching off and only becoming brutal by day. Social media is not collapsing tomorrow. This is the water we swim in.

 A child needs visible affection. A partner needs visible confidence. A woman who grew up in a controlled conditioned environment needs constant reassurance. A society needs visible commitment. Maybe the danger was never performance. Maybe the danger was pretending that performance is the whole story.

So, when statistics scream about heartbreaks and impossible expectations, when the so-called marriage market looks like a battlefield, it’s easy to say young people are running away from love. But what if they’re not running away? What if they’re running past it, past the old scripts, past the pressure - towards something quieter and more honest?

What if this confusion is not decay, but courage?

If love is truly the most beautiful feeling in the world, may be all of us deserve at least one honest chance to discover what it means — before we are asked to perform it?

What’s the worst that can happen? You either find love or you don’t.

And if you don’t - you can always perform it beautifully in words and call it a blog post.

Happy Valentine’s to all the lovers, performers, and the dangerously confused ones in-between!