Ten years ago I wrote something about how we will fall in love with the most unexpected person in the most unexpected time. Someone a lot older than me added: “and with most unexpected pain”. I was a kid; I didn’t know what love is. Its ten years later and I am still a kid and I haven’t figured out love yet.

The happy feels, tingling, head fuzz, butterflies, loud heartbeats, a sweet numbness that shuts down all the never-ending misery and heaviness of our existence. If the world is ending, the earth is crumbling underneath our feet; we would still think love is all we need.

But what is love? The question itself is a cliché. I mean seriously I bet everyone ever since Adam and Eve have asked that question. Scientists, philosophers, poets, and the very simple ordinary man, they all tried in vain. So maybe I won’t try. I will cut down to the chase, I don’t know what love is, but is it a losing game?

My friend once told me that love is misery, bittersweet melancholy; you never know love unless you meet its best friend, pain. You don’t understand it or fully experience it unless you once love someone who doesn’t love you back; she said she finds it profound to love in vain. My friend is a philosopher and a poet who just wanted to ease the pain. She is right though. One-sided love with all its frustration and pain can show the true color of humanity, sometimes giving and selfless and other times maniac and selfish. My friend is a hopeless romantic who never gives up on love. She knows it’s a losing game but plays anyway.

“I feel lost, how did I get here? Can this even be? Tell me is it a sin to love?”  “Is there a way in or out of this?”  In one of those I will talk, you listen and then we both forget sessions with a friend, she told me how she and this guy of two very different worlds found themselves in the deep. To be together they will break so many morals and so many hearts, now that is one hell of a losing game! Because what can you do? Somethings are bigger than us and bigger than love. You can’t let love cost you who you are, can you?

I know many people stuck in a “with or without I can’t live” kind of situation. Where love makes people addicts, the drug is your lover, killing you slowly but you can’t quit. In this case, you have the love, you live with it every day, and you cling to a flower with too many thorns. Holding on or letting go, you still lose.

I know dozens of stories like this, where love failed people and people failed love, too many broken hearts who sworn to never love again, but then who owns our hearts anyway? I know I don’t own mine. One of my favorite songs says:

And I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch

And love is not a victory march

It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.

I know I said I won’t try and analyze love, but here I am. Love is an illusion, a thought, an idea, and ideas are dangerous things, once an idea gets to you it can drive you crazy, but it’s a thought, there is no magic here. It’s just you and your illusions. Or you know what, maybe love is lust, biology, and instincts that is all it is, nothing more nothing less. It’s not even free well, it’s like gravity, Just like an apple never choose to fall from the tree, and we never really choose to fall in love.

A Sufi Sheikh once said that there are 99 shades of love, each shade is a whole different feeling and that is why it’s one of the most puzzling feelings there is. The analyst that I am wanted to study them just for the heck of it. I mean, after all, I am the type of person who googles something like “ the science behind broken hearts” I think I can break love down and analyze it in a lab, but even if I did, even if I knew it all will that make it easier? Will I win the game?

Life in its entirety is a game, And Gamers will tell you that in the best game when they are killing it and winning, they are still losing. Because once you win, collect all the gems and gold it eventually says game over and you are at point zero again. Life is so virtual in so many ways. And maybe the only way to not lose is to not play the game, but where is the fun in that?

There is no take-home message from this article, sorry. I am not better than those who tried before me, I have no answers.  I am just communicating, letting everyone know that hey! You are not alone, we are all losers here.  We are losers who refuse to believe that love is a losing game because, for all that love is and isn’t, it just can’t be a game.