The human experience is indescribable when it comes to the more raw and gritty parts of life. We will spend our whole lives trying to make sense of the people who embroider themselves throughout it. What happens when everything is a gray area, the world feels like its ending, and the chaos you claim to avoid but kind of love starts seeping into every vein in your mind? We turn to art.
We have all seen the 1997 video of Fleetwood Mac performing Silver Springs. As you know, Stevie is singing at Lindsey for everything he put her through. I, as well as every other woman in the world, saw that and experienced the world exploding into beautiful golden light. Finally being able to put that specific experience into words. Love has often been romanticized into this search for the perfect person. We are told to search for “the one” and if we find them, the imperfect romances of our past that left us bleeding out will evaporate into oblivion. I sold my soul to this idea, until I actually fell in love a few times.
Romance, for me, has been nothing short of terrifying and blissful excitement that crumbles into a memorial that I try not to visit. While it has been wild, I have lived nothing short of the full range of human emotion. The idea of finding your soulmate, that perfect person you never question or never hurt, is a mirage close to perfection. However, I have found the reckless experiences, interwoven with youthfulness and naivety, have been the ones that I remember most. Speaking with the women in my life, many of them feel the same way. The exhilarating stories they giggle about in a dimly lit apartment with friends are the ones that they typically tend to seek, rather than looking for a life partner.
Until recently, there has been very little media portrayal of the type of women who do not want marriage or that sort of white picket fence stability. Growing up, I didn’t really understand that that was an option. I believe this new idea, this challenging of amatonormativity, would not be prevalent without the women who brought it to life. Art has always been a means of rebellion and change. If we look at the underbelly of the prose and poems describing the intricacies of love, we see a much more interesting conversation.
My first interaction with this type of art was a poem titled I, being born a woman and distressed by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It was originally published in 1923 at a time where women were not very favored by society, to put it simply. The poem contradicts everything that we are told romance is. She makes it clear that her mind does not get clouded by this experience and she does not care to speak to the man ever again. The agency and the strength of Millay’s words were very new for the time, as she communicated that this man was unnecessary to her life and just a fun experience. I read it at a time in my life where I was breaking away from the idea that I wanted a relationship, or even a marriage. It changed the way I think about love.
You cannot talk about the challenging of these norms, without talking about the lifelong situation going on with Stevie Nicks. Since the 70s, she has been writing about a man she has a love/hate relationship with. They dated in college for a while and it has lingered throughout the entire legacy of the band and her music. She challenges the idea of “the one” being convenient and linear. She has built her own myth throughout this and it is a breath of fresh air compared to the media’s portrayal of women in love. She takes this story, that could easily be one of heartbreak, and turns it into a deeply meaningful work of art.
Olivia Rodrigo adds new life to this narrative. With her song The Cure, she tells the story of finding that love that changes you. She claims to have found the thing that would fix her, later accepting that the man she was so in love with would never be able to do that. Olivia got the relationship we are taught to spend our time looking for and realized that it would never make her whole. She got this dreamy romance and had to come to the difficult realization that it was never going to take away the pieces of herself that she wanted to ignore.
Stories like these are so important to tell. Watching women fall in love in different ways other than the stereotypical path is so interesting to me. Stevie Nicks and Haley Williams have these endless situationships, solely for the love of the game. Olivia Rodrigo found that deep love, but chose to leave because she felt it right for her to be on her own. We see it reflected in film as well. Throughout the entirety of Obsession, the female protagonist is possessed by this curse that makes her fall in love. At the end of the movie, we see the antagonist bleeding out on the floor as the protagonist gasps for air, returning back to herself.
I want my future daughters to grow up in a world where they do not feel the need to search for “the one,” but rather, look for experiences in which they can grow and feel what it means to be a human being. You never feel more alive than when your heart is broken. Instead of tiptoeing around love like it is broken glass, we need to run straight for it. Through the experiences of these artists, we are shown that there is so much life in, and on the other side, of love. A majority of women’s views on romance is shifting, and there is so much to be said about that. But for now, the communication of these experiences through art is creating damn good music.