Tess Everlasting

Now what's the deal with this business of eternal love? Humans are so fucking pompous to think that we can even grasp the idea of eternity in the first place. It's not enough to have something as wonderful as love; we want to make it last forever, too. Goddamn.

I'm pretty sure that the odds are overwhelmingly against eternal love, anyway. For evolutionary purposes, chemical love only needs to last long enough for procreation to happen, and when it comes to rearing families I'd bet that other instincts are mostly responsible. Look, imagine you get a tattoo that you love when you're 18 and you live to be 80. Do you suppose you're going to love that tattoo every single day of those 62 years? There are bound to be times when you at least feel ambivalent about it, and every once in a while you'd look at it and honestly hate it. One day, someone looks for the entrancing depths in their lover's eyes, and they see nothing. Call me a cynic, but shit happens.

And teenagers - teenagers are the last people who should be preaching about eternal love, and yet we hear a lot on the subject out of the mouths of babes. Teenagers are fucking maniacs, totally blitzed on a triple dose of love hormones, busting out Shakespeare porn after the first date. Teenagers want to propose to the hamburger they ate for lunch. That's fine, if mostly disgusting, until the notion of eternity starts getting thrown around. Yeah, you think your lab partner is The One when you're 17, and you think Eggos are the Best Food in the World when you're stoned. After you pop your last pimple and come down off of the hormone high, your lab partner is probably going to look a lot less special, and you're probably going to regret having bought 8 boxes of Eggos.

I'm no pot calling the kettle black; I, friends, am a kettle. I've often fallen deeply into that myopic brand of infatuation, and even now as a relatively self-aware idiot I still entertain my swollen dreams of happily ever after. And you know, with magical grace, sometimes those dreams eventually fit the bounds of reality. Reality, however, doesn't spontaneously become dreams. By no means should those dreams be censored - they should be as lush and sweet as satisfies the unconscious, but only if we can wake up afterward. People of Earth: make the most of love while you have it, but don't write it into your postapocalyptic calendar, advises this humble observer.