Idea of love and our Jigsaw!

What do you yearn for? Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs? Or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?

I personally would choose the latter. So let’s question our belief and idea of love today.

We as a generation are brought up in the time of cheesy rom-com cinema and have idealized and romanticized the idea of love. We live in an increasingly artificial world – fake news, fake filtered social media profiles – and most of them are smart enough to be sick of it. This is the reason we are driven through most of our lives by the idea we as a society have created and possibly a fake one.

Such an idea is Falling in love. Do we really know the idea of love or we are just filling up a portion of our life? Are we really loving our partner or we are just force-fitting our jigsaw?

Falling in love with the idea of being in love is toxic. And it’s just another symptom of a highly contagious, fast-spreading virus.
This “perfect” life plan. The belief that life is designed and arranged into very specific stages. It’s all been prepared, now you just have to follow instructions. If you dare not to follow the plan — you are one big failure.

We as a society believes in a complete life when we fall in love and get married. Our gods did that, our elders did that and that’s how we create a family. We have been raised on grossly unrealistic ideas of romance, with relationships seen as the key to solving our problems.

Danial Sloss, a Scottish comedian, explains this using a jigsaw metaphor to explain how finding a partner to ‘complete’ you is viewed as tangible, that you aren’t whole unless you’ve coupled up. He cites the movies we’re reared on as partial culprits for this impractical ideal: “Every Disney princess has a prince, every prince has a princess, every television show or movie always has a character in it that doesn’t want to be in a relationship… but then by the end of the series, guess what, they were wrong! … My generation has romanticized the idea of romance, and it is cancerous. People are more in love with the idea of love than the person they are with.”

He quotes his father, who explained the meaning of life to 7-year-old Daniel:

“Look, boy. Imagine that every person’s life is a jigsaw puzzle. We spend our entire lives trying to find all the pieces using our experience and the lessons we learn until we get a better version. But the thing is, everyone has lost the box for the puzzle. So, nobody knows what they should have in the end. And the best way to do the puzzle is to start from the outside — from all 4 sides: family, friends, hobby, job. And their condition changes throughout time: sometimes you make new friends and lose old ones. Sometimes, your job can affect your hobbies and you need to decide what you want more by moving the pieces. Sometimes, a family member can die leaving a hole in your life, so you need to fill it with something or the puzzle will be unfinished. And in the middle, there is a piece of your soulmate. Someday, a perfect stranger will make you and your life whole, as your mother did with me.”

Then he started to think that these cute ideas, along with modern culture, often make young people “choose the wrong person and try to squeeze them into their lives even though the puzzle piece is wrong.”

Throughout our lives, we are force-fed this idea that we must find a partner. That being alone means you’re worthless.

Movies, tv shows, and books often center around single characters who end up falling for each other. They romanticize love as being the one thing we must all strive towards. We dream to be like Monica and Chandler! Eh!!

So, is the jigsaw analogy actually correct?

In trying to jam another person into your life, you could end up losing a lot of the pieces that make up your own jigsaw. I believe there’s a delicate balance between sacrifice and compromise. And you don’t want to be on the wrong end of the scale.

You shouldn’t sacrifice building your own jigsaw so that you can try to share one with someone else. The whole concept of finding an ‘other half’ makes no sense. You should be a ‘whole’ and so should your partner.

As Daniel says, if you do not love yourself 100% then by getting into a relationship, you essentially “employed someone else to do it”. And what happens when the money runs out? When you realize you so heavily rely on someone else to love you? You might feel that you’ve lost part of yourself in the process. Or, even worse, that time has been wasted.

For Daniel, he says his happiness is drawn from many, many people; namely his friends and his fans, who allowed him to build up a successful career in comedy at the tender age of 26. That is the center of his jigsaw. For his father, his happiness does come from his relationship with his wife, with whom he is deeply in love. And that is the case for some. Your partner might just be your happy piece.

But what makes you truly and deeply happy? What is the centre of your jigsaw? It might be worth a little thought.

Do watch Jigsaw – Netflix and let’s discuss our Jigsaw?

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