No dear, it was NOT love...

People mistake a lot of things to be love. An extreme adoration of someone's gorgeous physical features may be confused with love. A person's display of absolute kindness may be mistaken for love. A playful and touchy-feely type of friendship may be mistaken for love. Giving someone a ten-thousand-dollar gift check to purchase designer clothes may be mistaken for love. Hey wait a minute, isn’t it?

Anyway, let me innovate. As it turns out, even feelings arising from self-insecurity may be mistaken for love, or least a desire for romantic love. Obviously that may just seem far-out, but yes, if Miley Cyrus can get a spread in Vanity Fair, then anything’s possible.

The question now is, how could a person ever mistake self-insecurity as a desire to be romantically involved? Well it’s not really a difficult question to answer. Just think of it this way: there are some people who simply have no desire for romantic love, for various reasons. They may have no time for it, they may just be too in love with other non-human entities (like clothes or perfume or dark chocolate), or simply because they genuinely feel that they don’t need it. There are just some people who possess such a high level of self-esteem and self-love that it may no longer be necessary to find those from other people. That’s not such a hard thing to understand right? It simply means that these people are in a position where they wallow in pride and self-content because of who they are or what they can do or what they have that the issues of who they’re with or whether or not they are with someone are basically…non-issues.

However, this superior level of self-esteem is not immune from being damaged. A lot of things can happen to a person that may endanger this unusually high level of security with one’s self which may have the person believing that he may not be that great being he believed himself to be. Suddenly the thought of being just a mere mortal enters his mind, and with this, comes the desire for what is usually wanted by ordinary people, as they think that they may find relief from their issues with the aid of these things.

When a person of this type feels that who he is or what he has or what he can do is no longer enough to make him happy or at least maintain the necessary level of self-satisfaction, this is when he begins to look to other things, things external to him, to fill that missing portion. Shopping and gaining material things usually work, but oddly enough, romance just seems so inviting.

Enter confusion. No, that is an understatement: enter, utter madness. The love they originally had for themselves is now transferred to another individual as the former may feel that he is no longer worthy of this self-love, and would hence just invest this “love” in the latter. What they think of as a new entity worth pouring emotions and fluttering feelings into is actually just some luck passerby who caught their eyes at a moment when they are confused, vulnerable, and desperate for something to make them feel better.

But it won’t take forever for the temporarily-confused person to realize the foolishness he has immersed himself. All he needs is a wake-up call, a trigger, or a role model with enough strength…no he doesn’t really need any of that. Well, maybe the return of a brain is necessary. Otherwise, all he needs is to realize that he was never romantically attracted to another person, least of all in love with someone. It was simply a matter of self-love displaced.
And the love is back to where it should be.

(**,)
“You know I adore all of God’s creatures, and the metaphors they inspire, but those butterflies have got to be murdered!” (Blair Waldorf, Gossip Girl)