Forever. Forever is just a word. Forever is just lexis within language. Forever cannot exist, eventually either it dies or you do. Forever is a word alike perfect. Perfect is impossible. Every advantage is followed by one disadvantage. Every achievement contains errors. Everything solved can always find another problem. So then why do these words exist when they are meaningless?

I love you forever. Do you? No seriously, do you love me forever? It’s just as easy to fall out of love as it is to fall into it. It’s easy to mistake being in love to just loving someone. It’s easy for you to just walk away. Is it? I guess that depends on the person and the situation.

You say forever like you are absolutely sure it will last. Can you predict the future? Can anyone predict the future? I think not. Therefore how can you stand there and say forever when you simply don’t know what can end and what can continue. ‘I love you’ is powerful alone. Hearing those words, seeing those words, saying those words bring a smile your lips but ‘I love you forever’ brings a tear to the eye. It is fake. Forever is fake, it means nothing. So when you hear forever, do you believe it?

These words are so meaningless and yet why do they exist? Furthermore why do they affect us?

Somebody gives us the best compliment we could ever wish to hear: ‘you are perfect’. We want to believe them. We feel like we need to believe them and yet somehow we just cannot believe them. We are meant to be grateful of compliments, they are meant to make us feel better about ourselves, they are meant to make us smile. However calling someone perfect has the opposite effect. In reality it’s more like an insult. It makes us realise exactly what we haven’t got and exactly who we are not. We know perfect does not exist and so someone calling us it, are either using it through an element of sarcasm or are lying to our faces. I guess that’s why it affects us, because we wish the impossible were possible, we wish that they were right, we wish that their compliment was true. We wish as hard as we can and yet our wishes don’t come true. Does it come as any surprise that we are disappointed? If we are not perfect that means there are problems. If someone reminds us we are not perfect by calling us exactly that, they remind us of those errors hence we are highly likely to go looking for the bad inside ourselves.

When someone tells you forever you want to believe them because you want it to be true. If you live in a dream world then maybe you are able to believe it but alike most of us you probably live in reality. Forever does not exist in reality. It affects you because forever is anything but real. Forever is impossible and yet if it was possible would that even give it meaning? It is meaningless because it is unreal and yet at the same time having no meaning gives it meaning. Having no meaning gives effect and effect gives meaning. I know what you’re thinking, this doesn’t make sense, right? It’s quite simple really. If forever was possible then what meaning would it have? What purpose would it follow? If everything lasted forever, then nothing would end, nothing would change, everything would stay the same. Things that stay the same lose their meaning. Therefore these words are meaningless but because of their existence they contain more meaning than they would if their definitions were true in existence in reality. I guess simplified this means that it means more to us that these words exist even if they have a negative effect on us, because having them be truthful would have no effect on us at all.

Imagine if words such as perfect and forever didn’t exist. Them being non existent would create an even greater negative effect than when they existed but only created pain and hurt. If being called perfect or being told forever makes us notice the bad things in our lives then shouldn’t that be a good thing as it highlights the things we can change? If insults like these were not given we would turn out to be a much more self involved population than we are with them. We would see no problems to who we were or how we lived our lives. If we saw no problems then nothing would change, we would not grow stronger as individuals, we would not develop from the people we were into the people we wanted to be.

Being spoken to with use of these words can be seen as lying as it is clear they are untrue. Sometimes its ok to lie. Not everything in life is about telling the truth. Sometimes we lie to protect the people we love. Sometimes we are right to do this, depending on the circumstances of course. Sometimes we lie by giving compliments. They say it’s the thought that counts right? So maybe, just maybe sometimes we give a compliment which we don’t think is true because we want to make that person happy or to boost their confidence. In these situations it is not what we say, but more our intentions that are important. Sometimes we lie because we want a way out, because lying is much easier than dealing with the truth. In the end the truth always catches up with you so why lie and create an even bigger mess than necessary? Fact: the truth affects people in different ways but that also depends on what you are telling them. An even greater fact: the truth may affect someone but a lie will affect them even more. The unknown part of the situation is that everyone reacts in their own way to the truth or a lie, whether that be physically or mentally. So is it really worth the hassle?

When you hear forever do you believe it? If you believe it you’re believing the lie, that can lead into you becoming the lie, becoming fake, how your live your life could become based on a lie, depending on the level of deception. If you ignore it because you know it’s not real then you’re believing the truth, you’re seeing the truth behind the lie, that doesn’t mean you cannot be affected by the lie though, even if you can see straight through it.

Are forever and perfect just words? Are they just lexis within language? When you hear them, see them, say them, do you believe them?