… on Finding Love, Peace, and Happiness


When finding love, you can’t look for it; you cannot seek it like it’s a job. Sure, you can post a ”love” post like it’s a job post. Shit, I’ve done that before. I’ve answered those ads before. Whether it was Zoosk, Match, Farmer’s Only, or even Tinder, it’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s like a Vegas magic show, but the trailer park version. No one is what they seem. Some just want hook ups. Some are just looking for that rebound love/fuck to get them back in the saddle. Obtaining love isn’t something that you go to Walmart and pick off the shelf or order on Amazon. Sure, there are sites out there where you can order your own Russian bride, but that’s just a form of sex slavery/human trafficking.

When finding love, you don’t realize it at the time. You don’t feel like this is the person you’re going to love. If it’s real, it starts organically. It could a blind date with someone that set the two people up, it could be a chance bumping of shopping carts at the grocery store, or it could be playing a video game on a phone, a video game that pisses everyone off by their greed, the blatant pay-to-win business model (greed), and the bugs that are so insanely dumb you wonder if a second-grader coded the game and their quality-assurance team was a bunch of fourteen year olds tripping on LSD while watching clown porn.

I might be exaggerating a bit, but that’s where I found love. No, not clown porn, but in a game. It wasn’t in the game itself, but through a Discord server. Now, Discord can go fuck themselves with their terms of service and their recent anti-free-speech bullshit, but even bullshit helps grow our food. I wasn’t looking for love. I wasn’t looking to divorce my alcoholic wife when I first started having conversations with this person. I wasn’t happily married, but I wasn’t looking for a way out of the marriage. A friendship grew from these conversations. I helped save the data on her laptop from 700 miles away. She helped me get through my hernia surgery when my wife was too drunk to even check on me. We were physically attracted to each other, at least in the photos we posted in group chats we both belonged to, but physical attraction isn’t love, and just posting a picture on the internet doesn’t mean it’s recent or true. I’ve been burnt on that more than a few times in my online dating days.

So when do you know it’s love, I mean real love? You don’t right away. I don’t use the term ”I love you” lightly. I dated someone who dropped that word two weeks into dating. That’s not love. Loving your parents is different than loving your kids. Loving your friends is different than loving your partner. We might say, ”I love you,” to each group, but it means something entirely different. These all evolve over time, but in different ways. In places like North Korea, they are not taught the concept of love. ”The Supreme Leader” is all their taught to ”love.” The concept of loving their parents or partners is broken over there. You can listen to a Darknet Diaries episode (https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/71/) that talks about the information war that country has on it’s people or one of Joe Rogan’s interviews (https://open.spotify.com/episode/0G5o6GYjWgbSvKG3W2W2xO) where he goes into depths about some of this. Love might be a ”social construct” in a (arguably) highly evolved society, but I think it is a universal feeling that anyone can feel. Parents die for their children in every country. Spouses lay down their own lives to protect their lovers.

I can deep-dive into the psychology, brain chemistry, social constructs all fucking day. That’s not the point of this post. Finding love is a “trial and error” process, even when we’re falling in love with that person. We all have our own baggage. We all have our own perceptions, based on our past experiences. I have to say that the past 24 hours have been enlightening and brought peace to a chaotic and anxiety-ridden life. As most Americans, I’m struggling to pay bills with massive inflation skyrocketing prices. Not being able to sell the house or property during this divorce isn’t helping matters. That being said, my girlfriend and I went out to have some beers with some friends of mine that she’s never met. Some of the people there weren’t technically my friends, but we ended up having a good time. The evening was even better when we got home. We talked about some deep conversations, and at times, I was getting anxious, but it was a very good night. We both woke up with anxiety attacks. It wasn’t major, but it was enough to wake us both up after only a couple hours of sleep.

This morning, I’m on the back deck, listening to the rain fall on the in roof while the thunder rolls in the sky. For the first time, in what seems like forever, I’ve found peace. It might be for only a few minutes or hours, but I’ve found peace. I’m drinking my coffee and writing this post. I’m not worried about what’s going on in the house or outside of my property lines. This hasn’t happened in a very long time. We’ve found love, we’ve found peace, and we’ve found happiness. That’s not to say there won’t be rough times or fights along the way, but it’s a lot more than either of us expected when we first started talking about a game that pisses is off. We’ve had our own self doubts that have been programmed into us by previous relationships that were based on manipulations. It’s completely natural for those doubts to creep in from time to time; they just creep in less often and without as much ferocity. We both have self-destructive tendencies that we base on not being good enough for the other person. We’ve both started realizing that we are good enough. The healing comes from peace. The peace comes from happiness. The happiness comes from the love. Finding it cannot be forced, but love is a force that can make all of the other bullshit crumble before it.

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