Love Stories: A Brief Analysis of What It Means to Love and Be Loved in an Age of Confusion and Disillusionment
*TW/CW brief mentions of violence and coercion
When I first left for university, someone once made a joke to me: “you are about to find the love of your life, either the man of your dreams or the alcohol of your dreams!” Wow, that’s a lot to unpack, isn’t it? Besides the weird joke promoting alcoholism, here we see a strange pressure in the mere four years of secondary education to find the goddamn love of our lives, whether it be the cute boy you made eye contact with as you were assigned your dorms in week one or the giant bottle of Smirnoff in the shop that you secretly long for each time you pass it. There is a lot to say about the pressure to find a mate in such a short time. I hate to generalize, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that it seems like women feel this pressure a lot more. Not to mention how obviously heteronormative this pressure is, as whoever first made that annoying claim had a specific image of soulmates in mind. We already know about these double standards, and even though little seems to be done about them, it’s not my job to repeat these simple facts over and over to the people who deal with it daily. When I try to defend myself to those who refuse to change their language and behavior, I get stuck with the accusatory label: crazy loud bitch. My agenda here is neither to rehash the problems of female objectification or give a lecture on acceptable behaviors. I guess I am just trying to analyse what love is for a university student like me in the post #MeToo era. Someone who has somehow changed every fiber of her being in the last four years yet remains the same classic “Alana” that so many know, and hopefully some like.
So, as I approach the final months of my last year at my university, the probing question looms, “Did you find love? Or did you take up the family trait of replacing your blood with alcohol?”
Did I find love? Yes and no. I say this because love has no permanent definition, in either feeling or action. Love molds itself into different shapes, patterns, colours, and styles. Sometimes, what we believe to be love turns out to be a manipulative form of control or some desperate attempt at attachment, as we often tend to mistake being needed as being cared for. Other times, love empowers us before we realize it’s there, protecting us from the things about ourselves we fear the most; it becomes the quiet companion that we never knew we needed but could never live without.
I guess to best answer how I both failed and triumphed, I will tell you what love isn’t, and more importantly, what love is, at least to me.
Love is not giving up control of your body just to keep someone in your life. Love is not accepting acts of violence from someone in any shape or form, even if you think they are worth enduring the pain for. No one is worth bearing that kind of pain for. Love is not letting someone emotionally crush you under the weight of their apathy, and love is not making excuses for such behavior because “they don’t know any better.” They do know better. Love is not bleeding through your underwear for days because you’ve lost any sense of the word safe in order to satisfy someone’s so-called needs. Love is not crying to yourself at 3am because they only talk to you on the phone if you objectify yourself to them. You are not a product off of an infomercial. Your body is yours to love and not another person’s commodity. Love is not desperately seeking faith, begging every single god in the heavens above to change a person into someone who can show just the slightest bit of respect for your existence. Love is not someone showing up to your door and refusing to leave until you give yourself to them. Coercion is not love. Love is not someone leaving you covered in bruises for weeks that you laugh about because if you don’t laugh, how do you explain? Love cannot explain bruises. Aggression is not love. If you feel like a used toy every day of your life, that is not love. If you wonder whether you will ever be more than just a body, that is not love. If you ever, for a single second, have to ask yourself if you will ever feel worthy, if you will ever feel deserving, if you will ever feel wholly human again, that is not love. How could it ever be?
These realisations all forced me to understand a truth spoken to me repeatedly: how can you know what love is if you have no love for yourself?
What a tricky question. I think the process of self-love is by no means a linear one. I did, at least a little bit, love myself before I started university. When I got here, I desperately wanted to succumb to the intoxication of a mutual romance, but I let myself go before I was ready. I had an experience that may have started as young love but turned into something that turned my whole perception of myself inside out. I seemed to learn to unlove myself in every way possible. I don’t blame anyone for that. Being young is as difficult as being human. However, in the process of recovering from such toxic and even abusive experiences, the path to re-discovering love, both for myself and as a unique experience outside of romance, continues to be more beautiful, more enriching, and far more intimate than I expected it to be. When I admitted to my friends the truth of how I experienced love, or in actuality, how I had never really known what romantic love was, I was unsure of how they’d react. I was worried they might shake their heads at me. Instead, they showed me what love for a university student really is, what love anywhere should be, and the list is infinite.
Love is buttering out your friend’s foot from her shoe because she can’t get it off herself. Love is feeling intense relief when a friend randomly phones you while you sit on the sofa, suffocating from your snotty tears, you know, that full-on sob that comes out of nowhere. Love is finding that one person you immediately trust with your life despite barely knowing them because that instantaneous bond is so intense there is no need for any explanation. Love needs no explanation. Love is that one compliment that makes you blush every time. Love is when someone’s eyes match yours in width when you talk about something you’re passionate about because they genuinely want to know more. Love is your friend giving you constructive criticism on the horrific short story you wrote in a way that doesn’t make you want to give up on creative endeavours permanently. Love is the chorus of laughter that accompanies that one story you have told a thousand times, but everyone laughs at it anyway because it is just that funny. It is, at least, to those you really love and who love you back. Love is admitting to your friend that you constantly think about that boy with the electric blue eyes that laughed at your joke that one time. Love is also that same friend gently suggesting that said boy probably doesn’t remember your name, let alone that moment ever happening. Love is the inexplicable feeling of contentment that spreads through you, body and soul, as you pass that one little bookshop for the twentieth time that day because sometimes it’s the place that entices you with certain romantic feelings, not the people. Love asks for nothing but love in return. Love is the necromancer, the one thing that brings us back at those times when we feel completely out of breath, lying in the graves we so hopelessly dig for ourselves. Real love reminded me that I was human. It allowed me to free my body from the burdens of its past. Love is uplifting. It should never be anything but liberating. Love is ever-changing in meaning but never absent from our lives, and this is why we must actively try and recognize its depth.
So maybe I have never fallen in love, and believe me, I thought I had for the longest time. To be honest, I am happy to learn that this experience was not love in the end, as I want to see myself and my body as more than some old beat and battered thing to be ashamed of. Still, I cling to the cheesy hope that I might love someone romantically one day, but even if I don’t, I am pretty content with myself as that weird girl who finds love everywhere she goes. If I have learned anything, there is something beautiful about being able to wear your heart on your sleeve, even if it’s not in season to do so.
Call me Hugh Grant with a toothy smile, but I do genuinely believe love is all around.I know my specific experience trying to escape the fate of being a sad alcoholic who knows no romance beyond the world of chick-lit might not resonate with many people. However, I think many of us have those experiences that trick us into believing we know what love is. There will always be people and things that make us feel we must give up a part of ourselves just to feel something or someone. Maybe we are taught that love equals sacrifice, but after going through hell and back in the world of romance, I argue that this need not be our dreadful reality. I think love should be that which makes us want to be the best version of ourselves, that which allows us to see past those who ask us to sacrifice our entire beings, and that which takes us to new heights with every beat of our hearts, whether we realize we are flying or not. Even if romance is dead, love never is, as long as we are willing to accept and adore it in every form it takes.
Illustrations courtesy of Livia Carpineto