The language of love

Looking for a decent Valentines Day card last month, I came across greeting after greeting which ran along the lines of "I can't live without you," or, "You are the missing part of me."  Similar sentiments are also a stock in trade for pop lyrics.  Am I alone in finding this language extremely creepy rather than romantic?

I didn't always feel like this.  When I fell in love for the first time, at the age of sixteen, I did my fair share of, "you make my life complete"-type mooning around.  I seem to recall copying out the passage from Plato's Symposium concerning everyone having another 'half'.  I think part of what appealed (as I was on the cusp of coming out) was that he suggested that your other half could be same gendered.  But I also wholeheartedly subscribed to the notion of having a 'soulmate': and she was it. 

At twenty, and in love for the second time, I once again tended towards dramatic and sweeping statements about how I "couldn't live" without my boyfriend.  Now, I just think it's a shame it took me so long to realise that, not only could I live without him, but that I would be a damn sight happier trying to do so.

However, while making wildly exaggerated declarations as a teenager and young adult is kind of expected, as a grown woman - and, I think, as a feminist - the idea that I might need someone else to be 'complete' is anathema to me.  There is something uncomfortably stalker-ish about rhetoric like, "I can't live without you".  It reminds me too much of couples who have Every Breath You Take by The Police as 'their' song, not realising the sinister nature of the lyrics.

For the reasons outlined in my post on being a 'spinster', I had been single for a long time before meeting The Boy in October last year.  My life - as I had created it - was busy, happy, fulfilling, creative and generally awesome.  So much so that it had been a struggle to find anyone that I liked enough to give up my time for.  Then he came along, and I liked him so much that I quickly realised that spending time with him was even more fun than spending time on my own.  And interestingly, it was the very fact that my life was busy and creative that attracted him to me in the first place.  But is he 'my other half'?  My 'missing piece'?  'The one'?  Those concepts imply the existence of a fate I don't believe in.  They also do away with the element of choice and free will.  To me, it is a far greater thing that I have chosen him; that although I recognise there may be other options, he is the one I want to be with.  I love him passionately and completely but he is not my soulmate.  We are not fated to be together, and I could live without him very well (albeit, now that I have met him, unhappily).  But I choose not to.

Because I don't assume that I am somehow 'meant' to be with him, I can recognise that things won't always be flowers and hearts and that our relationship will require work at times; work I am prepared to put in.  I can't help but wonder if people who believe in the notion of 'the one' are also people who bail at the first sign of trouble.  After all - their thinking often seems to go - how can your partner be 'the one', be your perfect match, if you're not getting on terribly well?  Is that the point at which you'd want to leave to search for someone else to be your real soulmate?  Or have I just become cynical in my old age; am I being terribly unfair about what are really just romantic declarations?