You and Trying to Live Without Love
The moral case for trying to live without love and the consequences of it.
Love hurts.
Despite all the amazing benefits which can come from it and how good it can make you feel, at some point it can hurt. Especially when it ends, hopefully when it does it doesn't end tragically with the one you love dying. When love ends in a non-tragic way, you can find yourself lost. As if a piece of you has gone away in large part because it does. The person you love is gone and they're probably never coming back. It can make you never want to love again. In feeling this pain, this can seem like a great idea. So long as you don't fall in love you can't end up hurt. You can leave behind any possibility of someone having that type of power over you ever again.
After all, you do have to surrender some part of yourself in order to be in love. Part of your independence has to be given up. You can't just go and do whatever you want any time you want. You have to be willing to consult and negotiate with the person you love. They have that right. It's part of the commitment you made to them when you agreed to be together. At the same time, they have chosen to surrender that part of themselves to you as well. It's part of the trade off. You get that back when you are no longer with that person. Some people prefer that power to taking the risk of allowing your life to be so controlled.
A life like that however isn't much of a life at all. It gets incredibly lonely and painful. You could even say that it rivals the pain you feel from trying to have love. To the point that you will on some level find yourself craving some kind of connection. No matter how fleeting or uncertain that love might be. You might even mistake what feelings you can find for love. Even letting those you feel things for do horrible things in the name of this craving. This can only reinforce the idea that you should get away from love and never open your heart to anyone ever again.
You season 4 is very much about finding a way to live without love. Joe has been burned so many times by love, at least from his perspective anyway, that it feels like the easier option to just get away from it. To close himself off from love and avoid any kind of pain. He's gone so far as to leave an entire continent behind and surrounded himself with people who wouldn't know what love looked like if it was staring them in the face. Namely the people who have the money and power to completely avoid anything close to love. It feels like the right thing to do.
Yet even surrounding himself with these people can't stop himself from wanting something like love. That craving doesn't leave him and in many ways it just gets deeper. He needs to take that risk, no matter how much he might get hurt in the process.
It's a fascinating turn of events and you should definitely check out the first part of season four of the show You as soon as you can.
You is available on Netflix.
The ancients used to classify love as a mental illness. Just saying ;-)