You should never become an expert in love and romance.
Now, before I get my alpha-sigma-giga chad card revoked, if I ever qualified for one, allow me to give some context.
After 4 years of daily writing online and trying to distill ideas from philosophy and psychology and show why they matter in real life, two of my posts finally went viral and got almost 4 million views combined.
The only “problem” is that those two posts were not the results of extensive research and effort to make a complex idea more easily understandable. Both of them were short, unscripted rants about something that I thought of as common sense:
-The masculinity guru's advice to “never open up to your woman because she will lose respect for you and leave you” comes from cowardice. The only woman who will leave you after opening up is the one who didn’t respect you or care about you in the first place. The advice not to open up comes from, and is accepted by, men who are afraid to find out if their partner is the right one for them.
-How can they talk about being a strong man, which is the main topic of these online masculinity communities, when their whole life philosophy is based on weakness? If you deal with your personal negative experiences with women by generalizing that all women are dishonest, disloyal, and even evil, and furthermore, you are trying to convince other men to think the same, there is nothing strong or manly about you.
Once again, these two points seemed like common sense to me. The only reason I shared them in the form of short rants (where, admittedly, more context and nuance should have been given) was because I think men deserve other voices speaking to them online, not only those that, on purpose or not, are making them bitter and resentful.
Which brings me to this idea of "mastering" love and relationships and becoming an expert in them.
At the moment of writing this, my two viral reels have received 6135 combined comments. Amongst them, you will find comments that restore your faith in humanity, but also those that make you question whether an IQ test should be required before creating an Instagram account. However, this time I want to address one specific type of comment that I’ve seen appear regularly.
The love experts, pick-up artists, seduction gurus...
People who claim they can teach you how to master romantic relationships so that you can predict what your (potential) partner will say or do. They teach you how to be in full control, so not only will you never get hurt, but you will get exactly what you want out of every social interaction.
I’ve been aware of this phenomenon long before I encountered it in my comment section. It was actually years before I started writing online that I had managed to explain to myself why I must avoid these gurus and not fall into the trap of letting one of them "teach" me how to navigate the complex world of love and romance. I just never expected I would have a platform big enough to act as a counterbalance to their unhealthy advice. But here we are.
So in the next couple of lines, I am talking to you, my reader, in an attempt to provide a different perspective on dating, relationships, and love.
Imagine how boring life would be if you were an expert on one of the most interesting, unpredictable, mysterious, and magical of all human experiences—love.
Imagine how much it would take away from the richness and beauty of this thing we call life if you could predict and control with surgical precision every interaction you have with other people.
Would there be less pain and confusion in your life? Sure. But are dullness and emptiness really the price you are willing to pay for this illusion of comfort and certainty?
How many of the world's great poems, novels, paintings, and movies would’ve never been created if it weren’t for the unpredictability and pain of love? Would've any of it ever been made?
How can we admire stories of great adventures but then seek protection from life's greatest adventure?
Have we become so unadjusted to the nature of human life that we want to control the uncontrollable and eradicate the necessary?
Have our souls become so small and poor that we have forgotten how to love love itself and let it be what it is—a transcendental experience that can only be nurtured and never controlled?
Stop trying to master love. That’s at least one aspect of life where you should always stay a beginner.
Thank you for reading.
Free Resources:
My free ebook: The Lost Art of Reading
Paid Resources:
The Art of Showing Up: A Clear and Practical Method for Mastering Consistency
The Gold Pill: Timeless Ideas for a Life Worth Living
If you like my Existential Espresso writing, there is zero-cost support in the form of subscribing, liking this post, commenting if you have any thoughts on it, and of course sharing this with anyone who would find it interesting.
Or you can consider becoming a paid supporter of Existential Espresso for 5$ per month. By doing this you would be helping me to keep investing time into researching and writing all the content on the daily basis.
What you get by becoming a paid supporter is access to the members-only essays (such as “Why Having a Price on My Head Didn’t Upset Me”or “Why Living With a Bulletproof Vest is The Best Thing to Ever Happen to Me”), as well as an opportunity to recommend topics for future essays.
However, even taking the time out of your day to read what I have to share with you means more to me than you can imagine. Thank you.
I like this one. I think, though, people haven't forgotten how to be enchanted by the mystery of love as a whole, people just get stuck hurting and naturally they seek out ways out of the hurt. I think the love gurus are targeting specific people, which are people who are heartbroken and looking for a way out of their pain and loss! Control is the answer for them. I think that once they heal, they learn to let go. Even when I've been heartbroken, I have saught out ways and read what certain people have written because it made me feel better to think I could control my "next" relationship with tricks and delusions lol. Once I started to heal, I consumed less of these gurus.
Oh my... a must read for many of us out there... appreciate this beautiful written piece... a raw human letter for us to appreciate a truthful meaning of life: love.