Cynics are the true romantics.

We think that to believe in love, is to grant it the highest honour.

But to not even conceive of something, to believe in the unbelief of it, to make
of love a nothing, is to place it higher than all things in existence. We know our
human world and human values are flawed; we can never quite make the absolutes,
good bad, kind cruel, but we think to have some vague and capacious concept of
what they are, to believe that they can exist, is to show our reverence or our
disgust for them. These are the romantics, the ones who believe they will fall in
love and reach their happy ending, and when relationships don’t fall into that
permanent haze of happiness, they discard them, because love is infallible. So it
wasn’t love. The romantics are never happy people. Not unhappy, but never
satisfied. Their absolute belief in something more is insatiable, and the
inability to disprove it is what keeps them believing. They invest their lives in
the unknown, and thus think they know it. But the cynics. The cynics know that
absolutes are so definite because they don’t exist. Nothing can be so clearcut if
it enters the realm of humans, the realm of consciousness and thoughts and their
tanglings with feelings leaving nothing quite, definitively distinguishable. So
they cast aside good. Are done with evil. They simply don’t believe in love. And
so they make of it something greater, far greater than the romantics who try to
pin it down to their lives. Not believing it exists is to say that it is too
perfect for this world. To say that love is made up or that love is a deception we
teach ourselves is to truly recognise the enormity of what we mean by that word.
And it is huge. Love has become so all encompassing, so demanding that to want it
is often destructive, and to have to receive ‘it’, terrifying. This doesn’t make
cynics cold, unfeeling, uncaring.. It makes them truthful. ‘I love you’. Those
three short words so many want to hear, thinking they hold some ultimate truth,
that to have them is to enter into some big world club, and that to say them is to
be genuine, that they can never hold, deceit, lies or trickery. So many people use
‘I love you’ as the magic pass to licensed immorality. So many people use ‘I love
you’ as chains around their misery. Cynics wouldn’t say ‘I love you’. Cynics
wouldn’t give you the same three words as to everyone else. Cynics wouldn’t make
how they feel for you part of some big world plan, relate it to how everyone
feels. Cynics might say ‘I feel this sort of longing for you when you’re not
around, and I play back our conversations in my head and I’d like you to stick
around because you say funny things that make me feel alive. I don’t how long this
feeling will last. I don’t want to talk about forevers, or always or everythings.
I just would like you to know, that if you want to call me whenever you’re sad,
I’d like to be the one who makes it better.’ It’s not ‘I love you’. It’s far from
it. But I think I’d prefer it.