Upon hearing such a phrase I can assume many of you are thinking, “Gee, that sure sounds familiar“. This would be the part where I interject with some smart remark along the lines of, “Silly, it’s the rule of thirds, and that’s an artistic law that pertains to some asymmetric variation of photography,” and while that may hold true, photography is certainly not the basis of today’s wonderful post. In fact, it’s about the simple rule of thirds. What exactly does this mean? If you can simply refer to anything even minutely significant in your lives you’ll realize it usually centers around the ominous number three: The Holy Trinity, baseball strikes, Britney Spears, and I can even go on to say that it’s the determinant of a plane or a circle (though I wouldn’t be surprised if you said you didn’t care.) No, the basis of today’s post is on the most overused, unrealistic and extremely under-appreciated phrase in today’s world: I love you.

La regla de los tercios

But before I go on, I believe some correlation to the phrase must be made. Therefore, I’m leading you to a rather brief background on what exactly the rule of thirds is. Many thousands of years ago (1797, actually) some artist by the name of J.T. Smith came up with this method of a perfect balance in which a picture is divided into two perfectly-spaced horizontal and vertical lines, as seen on the right. This would then divide the picture into three portions where the photographer would photograph the image in three forms: one in which the horizon corresponds to the top or bottom horizontal line, an object or person corresponds to the left or right vertical line, or an object directly hits the “power point”, which is basically a fancy term for intersection. Like I said, pointless information, but what exactly does this have to do with such a phrase? Good question! If we so hypothetically speak, we can apply the rule of thirds to everyday life, those that strictly pertain to emotions like so:

As you can see, this diagram displays the two horizontal lines as “I hate you” and “I love you”, those which I believe are the two most common yet insignificant phrases brought up on a daily basis. The vertical lines “belief” and “the truth” are direct opposites of each other, thus displaying the two most frequent assumptions we constantly mix up.

I Love You

Now at one point in your life I will assume you have either heard this phrase or used it on someone before. If you haven’t, you’re either extremely sheltered or completely oblivious, neither of which I’m here to discuss. Anyway, love, as defined by the all-knowing yet seriously undermined website Wikipedia, is the number of emotions related to a sense of strong affection and attachment. Such strong affection can be described towards a plethora of such desirable objects such as food, relationships, Facebook… You get the point. But the most common form of “I love you” is brought out when one person says it to another. No, I’m not referring to the shortened version like ily or any misspelled behaviors like “I luvv u” and “I lahv you“. I’m talking about the full-blown, completely committed I LOVE YOU. What was once a serious form of admiration has gruesomely transformed into one of the most meaningless quotes in the average teenager’s life. Why this bothers me so much may be due to the fact that not only have we faced such an issue as confusion towards a person’s true feelings for us, but the depression that strikes once we question the validity of the statement itself. I don’t know much about love, but I do know that as a child, I believed it to be the epitome of a relationship, the highest achievement one can gain from their partner. Yet, through such reformations I find that our modern-day version of a relationship itself has distorted. The degradation of such a gift is constantly being tossed around on school grounds as though it contains no such value but to express one’s affection towards a trivial concept.

I hate you

Another one of society’s favorite phrases is “I hate you,” a phrase that is most often used to describe an intense dislike towards someone or something. It is an unspoken understanding that only through such great needs shall this very quote erupt from our thoughts, thus verbally expressing our passion (or lack thereof) of such an object. Unfortunately, this too is abused to the point where it has simply become insignificant to its original meaning. This quote was once used to describe an abhorrence towards a certain individual, inducing depression and other such side effects to our emotional character. However, the term itself has depreciated to a menial phrase most often used to express, you guessed it, one’s affection towards a trivial concept.

When applying the hypothetical rule to this, you can see that you will not find a “safe point” anywhere on this chart. This is because when it comes to emotions, there is no equilibrium; you’re either slightly sane or completely oblivious. Like the rule of thirds, never is a person’s emotions truly symmetrical, and while it may lean towards the left side of the chart, it creates such an art that one cannot help but admire the beauty of its flaws. It can neither be helped nor ignored, simply, if one can learn to acknowledge such a science.