My Choice of a Lifetime: “Finding True Love” in a Sociological Imagination
Katherine C. Heller
Sep 22, 2004
Citations
4
Citations
Journal
Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge
Semantic Scholar
Key Takeaway Key Takeaway: Our culture shapes our romantic expectations, and I am questioning whether I have found true love, or if I am just imagining it.
Abstract
I fell in love in ninth grade. There was no doubt in my mind that I had found the person I was supposed to be with forever. However, after six years together we broke up and I moved away. I now find myself in what most people would think of as the perfect situation: I have a handsome sweet boyfriend, we have a beautiful apartment, and for the most part we get along really well. There is nothing wrong with my situation with him, but I still seem to question very frequently whether there is anything right about it either. Was I supposed to end up with my high school sweetheart? When it comes down to it am I going to be able to say yes to marriage with my current boyfriend, or have I come to see love in such an unrealistic way that I will never feel confident that I have indeed found what we are all socialized to believe is true love? Over time it seems that I have developed this idea in my head as to how I will feel when I have truly found the one for me. It is something that I have felt before, in high school, when everything was perfect with my now ex-boyfriend. When that relationship seemed to turn stagnant, problems arose and it ended. Now I feel like I am in a search for the situation I have now but I also want the feelings I had then. Have I constructed a vision that rarely or never exists? I feel that it is important for me to look at this from a phenomenological perspective, not taking for granted what I have learned about love and how it should be, but to question it instead. I think that in doing so I may find that I am worrying more about this situation than I should be. Are there not other things that I should be more concerned about in my life? Not taking into consideration things that I have learned from my culture and only looking at my own experiences, I would say that I am in a really good situation now and I should be grateful. However, our culture has a tremendous impact on us and the shaping of my romantic expectations which I have never really thought about. Writing these words has led me to acknowledge the fact that the media that surrounds us is constantly teaching us what the norms are as far as falling in love and marriage goes. What I see all around me on a daily basis are advertisements suggestive of love at first sight, and the majority of movies portray relationships that are perfect in all ways (most of the time, even in movies where a relationship goes bad, the character will end up finding a new perfect love that they never even knew existed). It is rare that I actually stop to think about how many real couples I know that have absolutely perfect relationships filled with never-ending absolute infatuation with their partner. Of course I know people in great relationships, but even they are not as fabulous as the ones we are led to believe are real by our entertainment media and advertisements. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's social construction of reality is interesting to consider in this situation. They examine the "processes by which any body of 'knowledge' comes to be socially accepted as 'reality'" (Wallace and Wolf, 277). Who is to say that what we are shown by our culture surrounding ideas of love and relationships is right? Perhaps my concern over finding a dream relationship is unnecessary. Am I looking for something that has been accepted as reality but might not even exist? Keilah Billings, for instance, wonders in "Questioning Motherhood: A Sociological Awakening" (2003/4) about how much we consciously make important decisions about our lives and how much we just accept as being predetermined. This struck me as very interesting because it made me acknowledge the fact that I have this hope that the person I am going to spend my life with is in a way predetermined or determined by fate and at the same time I am fighting to make "the right" conscious decision so that I will go on to live out my fate. My quest for a relationship that may not even exist has been a continuous stress in my daily life for several years now. …