In the age of social media where every third post shows a boyfriend preparing a huge red rose bouquet for his blissfully unaware girlfriend, I have found that comment sections will almost always have that one comment, ‘May this love find me’. But what exactly do we mean by that?
Do women desire grand performative gestures of love or tiny pockets of joy when the person they love remembers a small detail about them that they mentioned 5 years ago? At what point is love too meaningless that a woman feels like a burdensome side-thought, or too performative that she feels like she’s being love bombed? At what point is love too much? Can genuine love ever be too much?
Being raised in an immigrant family taught me that love is a form of sacrifice. It is about showing up for others, often at the cost of yourself. I now realise that love is a burden made for two that is shared by two. It is an act of sacrifice by two people, who never fail to show up for one another. The patriarchy shows us that women should accept that the reality of love is erasing any societally unacceptable shortcomings about themselves in the hopes of finding true love. So, it should not come as a surprise that the reality of unconditional love is that should women conform to societal expectations, we must sacrifice.
But this should not be the reality. The façade of unconditional love being a relentless war of who loves who more quickly diminishes into a socially-constructed cage that forces women to cut away at pieces of themselves and sacrifice for our loved ones. To be loved is to be seen. To be understood. I guess somewhere along the way we forgot that love is not a path for one, but a dual carriageway.