My friend Tracy thinks that her married ex-boyfriend was it. It’s been five years since he chose someone else over her but she is still talking about how she doesn’t believe she could possibly love anyone else. He was her soul-mate, she says.

I don’t understand it because to be honest, I don’t believe that there is such a thing as soul-mates. And no, it’s not because someone hurt my feelings and now I have made it my life’s mission to defame love and everything love stands for.

On the contrary, I love love. I love happy endings, not the pathetic and unreal movie happy endings of course. Those ones, I genuinely loathe. I loathe the drama therein.

The main actor runs to the airport to supposedly stop the love of his life from leaving and when he finds her, they kiss while strangers clap. And then the director yells, "Cut!” and then people (especially women) watch the movie and dehydrate their bodies. 

The actors get their fat paychecks and go back to their loveless lives because let’s face it, most of them are either divorced or have no love in their lives.

But some of the people who watch the movie genuinely believe that that is how their love lives should play out. If there is no drama, if there are no grand romantic gestures, if there isn’t someone to stay hang up on for the rest of your life no matter what, then it isn’t love. 

And it can’t be argued that getting over someone who hurt you and walked out of your life and moving on with your life is a choice you can make. I have actually been accused of not having ever been in love for arguing that it’s possible to fall in love again and again.

But it’s not so much about my inability to love as it is about the fact that I love myself more than I love anyone.

And no, I’m not selfish. Even the good book says it; love your neighbor as you love yourself, thus implying that I ought to love myself first before I love anyone.

Loving myself means eliminating the things that make it hard for me to enjoy the one life that I have to live. It means willing myself to stop obsessing about a person who isn’t in my life anymore.

I want love in my life, I do. I don’t want to end up alone. If movies are anything to go by, people who are alone have to have a pet of some sort. I for one am too old to be groomed into seeing animals as pets. Cats get rid of mice, dogs guard the home or at least that’s what I observed during my formative years. For companionship, you strictly look to humans.

But until I find real love, and by real I mean simple, undramatic, comfortable, I will not be hanging onto feelings and memories and texts and photos. Anyone who leaves my life gets forgotten.