I feel dating is a waste of my time and don’t believe in “love” anymore…

The Inuit have 50 words for snow capturing all its nuances. Sadly the English language only has one word for love. A word capturing none of its nuances. Without nuance it is I think to easy to mistake the word love for that which the word can only point to.

What does it mean ‘not to believe in “love”? What of love in context of relationship? How can it be that a relationship that ends painfully, in disappointment, after a time of grieving, can open a person to a deeper relationship to Love?

A purpose to dating can be to find a life partner but that is only one possible purpose, if purpose is something the idea must have.  Dating, meeting people is a experience, a engagement with life. Love and healthy boundaries are not separate ideals, but  intimately entangled.  Relationships teach this lesson… often the hard way. Learning, growing, becoming… is a attribute of Love, perhaps even a intention of Love.  Thus a painful end to a relationship can still be Love.

What would it be like to engage with others and ourselves without the demand/desire that it meet a ridged, mostly unconscious, definition and expectation of love and relationship?

I do not know about soulmates. I wonder if the relationship we have to the idea of soulmates isn’t defined very well.  I suspect we tend to make quite a few assumptions about what a relationship with a ‘soulmate’ should look like.  I wonder how much the desire to control life in order to match our wants and desires is projected onto that word ‘soulmate’… and ‘love’.

We use words like love and soulmate without fully understanding what we mean by them. Without fully understanding what we are pointing at. What we expect from them. A relationship ends and we say it was not love, the partner for that time was not my soulmate. But what does that assume? What does that say about ourselves and how we relate to those words?

Words are symbols on a map and a map is not the territory. Like the finger that points to the moon, words point past themselves to something words can’t contain. So easy to mistake the word for the thing it can only point to.  The buddha once said to imagine someone is trying to show you the moon by pointing at it. The pointing finger is what guides you to the moon. Without the finger, you might not notice the moon. But the pointing finger isn’t what matters most.

The words we uses to point with, matter. Words have power.

What am I saying…. nothing probably… maybe something. Forgive my intrusion