Street Poetry

Not all graffiti is boastful, exhibitionistic, homophobic, misogynistic, anti-American (or anti-NATO), or racist. As proof of such, my friend, Juantomas, recently encountered this piece of urban art. The graffiti reads, as roughly translated,

You’re in love when you realize that someone else is unique.

Because I believe that we are much more predictable (acting in normal patterns and behaviors) than unique, I would personally disagree with the quote. It is our great insecurity that leads us to believe the individual “I” or “me” somehow lives on the fringe and that both our predicaments and character are somehow essentially special and unique. As we cannot accept ourselves as anything other than truly “individual”, it would be disastrous for our self esteem to settle for someone “normal”. Isn’t love both blind and resting nestled in the eye of the beholder?

To that effect, the graffiti should have read quite the opposite, reflecting the illusion of someone else being different from the pack:

You’re in love when you believe that someone else is unique.

That’s what’s so celebrated about love. It makes us think someone else is just as unique and special as we desperately would like ourselves to be. And if the love is requited, then it becomes a virtuous, symbiotic delusion fest.

On second thought and in defense of the romantic, I suppose one could argue that more than a “realization” or “belief”, it is the creation of uniqueness; hence the “significant” in the “signifcant other”. Thus the quote could follow a more creative tone:

You’re in love when you make someone else unique.