I have been in love very few times in my life. It is odd to say a few times because every happily married couple I have met (only one and they are my grandparents) has said they have only been in love once and that‰’s only if you‰’re lucky. To them the mere thought of loving anyone else is inconceivable. Initially I found this thought romantic, but upon further thinking I have come to realize that we are all screwed. Not in the kind of way you‰’re screwed if you accidentally and drunkenly run into your professor in CVS at noon on a Wednesday. But the kind of screwed where a life without the other person is a life not deserved of living. The kind of screwed of such enormous proportion that it‰’s paralyzing.

True love means giving your life away to someone, albeit in the most beautiful and heroic way possible. You lose yourself in an abstraction. You don‰’t see yourself through your own eyes, but rather through your loved one‰’s perception of you, which makes you painfully vulnerable. Which leads me to think I don‰’t know why I love being in love. I‰’m sick to my stomach most of the time either in longing for the other person or in fear that they are going to wake up one morning and realize I‰’m not who they think I am.

Yet, I truly believe it is all worth it when it‰’s real and not just a projection of my loneliness. I knew I was truly in love when I saw him kick off his shoes while playing ukulele and I saw his socks. My breath left me. I considered myself the luckiest person just to get a mere look into the most intimate, but not hyper-sexualized, aspects of his life. I love his socks more than any random hook up.

The look-alike spawn of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Lana Del Rey, pays homage to the man she loves and who supposedly the entire album, Born to Die, is written about. In the song “Video Games‰” Rey beautifully sings about the object of her affection playing video games. She opens the song by setting the scene with simplicity. Her and her lover are just enjoying beers and playing videos. This leads to her proclaiming that “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you/Everything I do/I tell you all the time/Heaven is a place on earth with you.‰”

The grandiose parts of love are okay, i.e. love letters, make-up sex, and gifts. But, as Lana Del Rey proves the beauty of love comes in the moments not normally sung about in love songs. There are very few things as wonderfully unnoticed as two people in love sitting on a couch who are comfortable in their own silence. Louis Armstrong in the American rendition of “La Vie en Rose‰” said that when you’re in love, “everyday words seem to turn into love songs.‰” Thanks to Del Rey, that sentiment has never seemed so plausible and obtainable. Her dedication to the man she loves is not sad or pathetic. It is real. “Video Games‰” is not fluff. It is a testament to the sheer amazingness of how screwed up love is. The dedication to a single human being and the dependency she feels. But how lucky we all would be to get screwed like that.