It’s Valentine’s Day, so let’s talk love. In particular, let’s talk about why I can’t really get into Ellie Goulding’s Got You On My Mind.
Ellie’s main problem in the song is that she loves someone but doesn’t know why: how can she be sure that her love is valid if she doesn’t even know why she feels as she does? My question about romance is the exact opposite: how can you be sure if your love is valid if you know why you feel it?
One of the main narratives about love is that there’s someone for everyone. This is one of the many things that we lonely people say to be able to continue in this world, the implication being that, even at your lowest, you’re not unlovable, you’re just not loved now (or more accurately: you are loved, it’s just that neither you – nor your lover – realise it yet). This is a narrative we use to take romance out of our hands and inherently ties love to the idea of fate: if it is certain that you will one day be loved, then life becomes just waiting for that day, thus saving you from having to do anything yourself while the world simply sorts itself around you. The idea that there’s someone for everyone is basically a massive ego trip, albeit one which makes you a largely insignificant force in your own existence.
These narratives are, of course, bullshit: the universe is random, life is pointless, and any meaning in the world is purely the creation of the beholder. So if the universe isn’t dictating our love lives, what is love and how do we fall into it? Well (and this is going to make me sound cynical), we fall in love largely due to evolution. During the earliest periods of our race, we found that it was easier to hunt as a pack as opposed to hunting on our own. We also found that people died and could be replaced through non-dead people doing sexy stuff. Then, by limiting the sexy stuff to two people each, we found that we could weed out the elements of humanity that we didn’t like by literally cutting the most unpleasant people in society off from the reproduction game. So love became very important to the sustainability to the human race: it was the most effective way we had of regulating the population. This is why love is such a fundamental part of our societies and who we are: because it’s literally the thing through which the human race is able to continue.
Combining these two, we also arrive at the main thing about love: it gives us a place in the world. Firstly, being in a reciprocated relationship increases love’s effectiveness as an ego trip: it gives you positive confirmation that you are loved, respected and likable. It also confirms that you’re human: you have your place in society, you will contribute to the species’ continued existence – in short, you are important.
The result is that we search for love everywhere, purely because we are also constantly speaking approval and evidence for our existence. And this means that, basically, human beings can find love anywhere and fall in love with anyone, usually for the tiniest of reasons. If you’re looking for love everywhere, eventually you will just start grasping at straws and occasionally your mind will get fixated on someone who usually wouldn’t be your type.
And that’s why Ellie Goulding’s lover is on her mind: because a) she’s scared that her existence is unimportant and b) a human being’s primary response to existentialism is to fall in love with whoever’s nearest at the time. As such, when she sings “My heart doesn’t understand why I’ve got you on my mind”, I (quite cynically) respond by going “Well, it’s basic psychology, innit?” and thus don’t exactly relate to the song in the way Goulding probably intended.
Indeed, the relationships I don’t understand are usually the ones that I follow the most. Anyone can appear in my life and be nice enough that I slightly fall in love with them. That’s the point when I have to ask myself whether I truly like them or if I just want to be loved by someone. There are always so many reasons that you love someone for which don’t involve the other person at all. As such, give me someone who I should have no reason to love and I might actually like them purely because I like them. And that seems to me to be a purer form of love: one where you love your partner and so get the evolutionary benefits instead of one where you’d love the evolutionary benefits and so have to find a partner.
So Ellie doesn’t know why she’s got her love on her mind. To which I react: “Good. Go for it.” It’ll probably crash in flames – most relationships do – but she’s a pop star; she’ll at least get a song out of it. It’s not like our lives are important enough to care about anyway: otherwise we wouldn’t need to be in love.
What are you waiting for?
TheWrittenTevs 