Why do we only look at love to mean something romantic?
I love my family. I love my friends. But that’s not the same as being in love with someone. There is a certain kind of weight associated with romantic love. I mean, I get it. There’s something very exclusive about being in love with someone. Not everyone can be in love and there’s not a lot of choice in who you end up in love with. It just hits you like a virus where suddenly you’re in a daze, taking the long way home and praying that you casually bump into them.
Being in love has so much drama! It’s exciting. It makes you nervous. When things go well, you’re on cloud nine. Life is saturated with color. All your senses are a thousand times more vivid. The beauty surrounding you awakens. All the mundane landscapes of every day shine in a different light and you simply cannot explain why.
But when things go wrong, it’s a death sentence. You feel physical pain in your chest at the thought of them. Every single thing reminds you of them and the world is stained gray. There’s a metaphorical rain cloud following you around and everyone can see it. You end up crying uncontrollably after 10 pm and a pint of ice cream magically spawns into your hand. Somehow, the “I miss you” text is sent from your phone to the exact person everyone told you to block. As you shovel spoons full of ice cream into your mouth, you claim it is “the only sweet thing” you have in this “cold cruel world.”
You feel all the feelings. There’s no other experience that feels quite as extreme and simultaneously is so beautifully accepted and romanticized by society. Crying about your grandpa passing away? That’s awkward and uncomfortable. But crying about how your boyfriend, who wasn’t your boyfriend, was talking to another girl at a party? That’s a universal experience that everyone will eat up!
Romantic love is EVERYWHERE: in nearly all Billboard’s top hot 100 songs, in the plots of most books and movies, in the billion-dollar industries surrounding weddings and Valentine’s day, in the conversations with your parents as they start insisting on having grandkids and seeing you continue the family line, and in the PDA your poor innocent eyes have to witness if you are too aware of your surroundings at the club. Romantic love can be found seeping into every facet of life. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The alluring marketability of love is so gatekeep-y. It thrives on the idea that technically everyone can be in a romantic relationship; but, where it falls short is how it fails to also mention that romance is a two-player sport and not everyone is a team player. Some people have never played before. Some people don’t know the rules. Some people simply don’t care to play fair. Sometimes, it really isn’t you. It’s them. We have entered an era of hyper-romanticism where all the feelings associated with romance have been played up with intensities that make love seem like a life-or-death situation. We see people live and die for love. We are told this is the expectation. This is real love and everything else will fall short. And no one wants to be the living human tragedy that has never experienced it. But once you have loved someone for a while, you’ll realize that something healthy and stable seems quite dull in comparison. Loving someone is very different from falling in love with someone, and none of it is easy.
I think we also forget how modern-day love is new. Marriage wasn’t always for love. It was mainly a financial pact up until the latter half of the 20th century. Some older ancient civilizations saw love as a fever, something that made you erratic and lose all sense but you had to let it run its course. Once it was over, the waves of emotions would feel like a dream and things would be clear again. In ancient Greek philosophy, there are many different types of love. The types included sexual passion, deep friendship, love for everyone (strangers), family love, and love of the self.
I like to imagine that there is no hierarchy of love. Instead, all loves were just different, with each of them bringing their own experience that is incomparable to the next. There’s something to value with the love we have in our relationships with family, friends, strangers, and ourselves. There are not enough examples in media surrounding healthy love in different forms so there’s not a clear framework to model after. Young women grow up learning how to love a man in the form of Disney movies and fairy tales, but never how to navigate friendships, family expectations, or even just simply how to love themselves. I think the main thing about love is connection. You can’t explain it but it’s there and you feel it. And who’s to say that connections have to exist in a romantic vacuum? Your friendships deserve your love and attention. Your family, however you chose to define that, deserves your love and attention. And most importantly, you deserve your love and attention.
Now, I’m writing this as a 20-year-old young woman who has never dated. For the first 18 years of my life, I struggled to find a consistent group of friends. Growing up, there were long periods of time when I barely spoke to my parents. I hated myself so much that I didn’t think I would make it past the age of 15.
I used to sell myself the lie that romantic love would fix everything that’s broken. I just needed to find at least one person willing to love me. I thought that love would be packaged in a golden boy with wavy dark brown hair and soft brown eyes that would melt into mine. He would have arms that would know exactly when to hold me and allow me to sob without fear of being seen as weak, the way I haven’t since I was four-years-old. Someone familiar, but new and exciting. And I thought I saw him everywhere, holding onto that delusion like a lifeline. I believed the lie that without love, you can’t see and appreciate the beauty in the mundane things around you. I hated everything. I lost sight of all the wonderful things I already had. I didn’t realize what was there until I lost it all for good.
I got tired of waiting for the right person or the right time. I wanted to be able to love as I wished. Time is limited and I didn’t want to waste it waiting for someone who probably didn’t exist. So I’ve worked hard on my relationships with other people. I am extremely lucky to have parents who continuously support me and try their best to understand me, even with our long and hard conversations. I have older sisters that check in on me and listen to my silly stories. My friends have shown me exactly how much I deserve to be loved.
I look at myself and everything is different now. I know who I am and what loving me should look like. I would like to think that I know what would and wouldn’t make me happy. I chase the small nuggets of joy whenever I can. Life still isn’t easy but the burden is less and less. I share love more freely. I smile at strangers in the store and I play peekaboo with little kids in line. I compliment people whenever I can because what’s the point of thinking lovely things about people and never telling them? Now I smile and laugh just as easily as I cry. I take myself on dates and give myself the space to do more of the things I love. Things are better. I feel loved, all without even the slightest thought of having a significant other.
Maybe I’m just bitter and trying to be happy just to spite all the couples luckier than me.
Or maybe I just like to hold onto the hope that, regardless of what the universe has in store for me, what I have now is fulfilling. So when the next tragedy strikes, I’ll bounce back faster and a little less broken than before.
Who knows? But I think I’m happy right where I am.