So, I wake up every morning, and since I don’t have much going on, I like to read my daily horoscope first thing, no big deal. I take it all with a grain of salt because it can’t be 100% and I like to make my own perceptions of how the day will go, but it’s nice to read about the possible basis of my day. What it tells me to avoid, I try to take as a sign and avoid, and what it tells me might be good, I try to embrace if the opportunity arises. My horoscope comes with a notification on my phone; usually just a sentence and they are also usually very interesting. Today’s said there is something pleasurable in the act of pining, which sounds… horrible. I can tell you right now that pining after someone can be fun for the first little bit, but the negative most definitely outweighs the positive. I spent some time thinking over this, and I had to write about it, especially how our society views things like this and how dating actually goes on.
So, pining for someone is going after and having feelings for someone they aren’t with or can’t have. To “pine” for someone, you’re thinking about them all the time, you want to be around them all the time, you desire them. I like to describe it this way rather than “in love”, but you could almost think of it that way if you want, except for the fact that the other person doesn’t love you back (ouch). The issue is that pining for someone is usually associated with these negative emotions, specifically not being able to have that person. I don’t know why these things are so glamourized, especially in film and stories you know, the guy pining after the girl until he finally gets her to fall for him, and it usually ends up working out and everyone is happy, but we all know life is never that perfect. I went ahead and read some stories online about people and their experiences with pining and let me tell you, it does not sound pleasurable at all. These people sounded miserable about it, and that, to me, is what the pining experience truly has always meant to me. It’s like unrequited love, and I’ll get to that later.
Holding on to feelings for someone, from personal experience, does nothing more than holds you back. You must be able to process these and move on at one point or another. I’ll be honest, I really love these kinds of topics for whatever reason. I should rephrase, I enjoy talking about them, but I far less enjoy being a part of them. Going back to these stories I was reading, it made me think of a quote from a movie I really love, is it better to speak or to die? I know it sounds morbid, but I promise the context was around the same; someone has feelings for someone else and they don’t know whether to speak about them. Well, according to the internet, it is better to speak, because pain is inevitable, and suffering is optional. Cool way to look at it I guess; your kind of in a lose/ lose situation if you’re stuck pining after someone, so rather than suffering over that feeling forever, if you get it out and you’re honest, you can either start the moving on process, or start the wedding planning.
Now, I’ve also heard the saying, and I’m sure you have too, that love is like a drug, and so when you’re pining after someone, you’re trying to get that fix. It all has very scientific aspects of how these things give you dopamine and mess with your hormones and whatnot, and I’m no scientist but you can definitely feel those things happening whether you know it or not. Maybe some people are more susceptible to this doom of constantly pining after people because of their levels of dopamine, or maybe it’s an addiction thing, I can see how that would make sense. Another thing that pining is associated with is limerence, which is understood as a state of obsession with someone. You can see how all these terms kind of are the same but slightly different and how they interact with one another. Now, limerence is often experienced by those with unresolved trauma or child development issues, whereas pining doesn’t really have any sort of set of “requirements” per se, but it’s also possible that pining can become limerence and become a sort of obsessive thing, and we do not want that.
Lastly, I wanted to talk about unrequited love, which sounds all pretty but it is most definitely not. Unrequited love is sort of the same thing, again, it’s just one-sided. Now I wanted to mention this because it was actually a part of my horoscope, going back to the beginning of this post. I was reading through, you know seeing the do’s and don’ts of today, and it quite literally listed unrequited love as a don’t, when it told me pining is pleasurable. I’m going to need costar to explain themselves because this math is not adding up, I did think it was kind of funny though, maybe a little puzzle I had to figure out for the day. But on a real note, unrequited love is something you should avoid at all costs; let it be a Frank Ocean lyric and nothing more in your life.
I guess the topic of love is so interesting because of how we need it. We must be loved as soon as we’re born by our parents or caregivers, and we have to experience love for the rest of our lives in order to go on every day. It’s so odd though, the way that society has evolved in this way that people don’t think they need love anymore, and yet here we all are, so depressed and anxious, some people pining after others, and others not emotionally available enough to do anything about someone who might be in love with them. Whether its pining after someone, experiencing limerence or unrequited love, feelings are good to feel! As long as they don’t end up out of control and going on and on forever. Take my advice since I don’t follow my own, be honest and speak up about your feelings before you regret it, and just let yourself love and be loved by people because life is too short.
Check out costar for your horoscope (you can connect with friends and that cute person you want to know more about too).
