Brief Notes on Loving
Listen, I’ve been a lover girl, a hater, a woman scorned, a ghoster and ghostee—and what have I learned? Having a crush, being the object of someone’s affection, is just better. Provided that person is stable and kind and not at all abusive in any sense of the word (“Ay, there’s the rub”), there is a peace of mind that can only be truly achieved when someone knows you, and knowing you has brought them to love you.
There have been times in my life when reading the above statement would have made me uncomfortable. I’ve spent so much of my life protesting the romance-to-marriage pipeline, as I see it, that’s been pushed down my throat since birth, despite my parents’ best efforts. “I just want my children to be happy,” is all my mother ever said to us of coupling. “And hopefully that isn’t alone.” There have been times in my life when I have been alone as a person can be, and I told myself it was better than being unhappy with someone else. I’ve written about loneliness before and how I think it’s essential to humanity, like how I think everyone should be required to work in customer service for at least a year before they’re allowed to join the adult world. I believe that if you’ve never been really, truly lonely, you haven’t lived. I feel the same way about people who, if they were murdered in cold blood, their loved ones could say, “But everyone loved her!” Which is to say, I feel the same way about people who have no enemies. Also, anyone who says they have no regrets or lives their life without regret is a liar and probably an asshole. Loneliness is the same.
But I used to live alone. It was just me, myself, and the hundreds of spiders I killed or otherwise trapped per week. I had friends, sure, but no one to really keep me company. No one to remember how I like my eggs or what side of the bed I prefer to sleep on. Now I live with my parents, and I thank the goddesses that being alone simply means closing the door to my room. When I’m done being alone, I just open the door. Do they know which side of the bed I prefer to sleep on? No, but it’s a twin bed anyway, so it’s kind of all one side. Do they know how I like my eggs? For the most part, but they also know I prefer to cook them myself. Do I sometimes want to strangle them? Sure. But do I ever wish I still lived alone? Never. I hope to never live alone ever again. I hope to never again know that loneliness.
We live in a culture currently obsessed with self-love and gratitude, two concepts that are all well and good until someone uses them to sell you something, which they usually do. When I was at my most alone, I too became obsessed with self-love and gratitude. I convinced myself that being grateful for what I had and never needing/wanting anything else was the height of self-love and compassion. I convinced myself that, should nothing about my life ever change—my living situation, my friendships, my love life—I should be content with that. I convinced myself that was gratitude.
What an utterly foolish thing. I mean, first of all, everything changes all the time. Change is the only constant. I have a sticky note with that written on it above my desk. So, accepting that nothing will ever change and I should be happy anyway is simply a waste of time.
But also, how tragic that I thought not wanting more for myself was the best way to love myself. If I’d truly loved myself the way I liked to believe I did, I would have aspired to so much more than living alone in a spidery barn where even the mailmen forgot I existed and delivered my mail to the wrong address.
Everything good that has ever happened in my life has come down to one thing: me. (Of course, the accident of my birth means I’m extremely privileged and that privilege has obviously played a role as well, but what I’m trying to say is that I make things happen for myself.) Every job I’ve ever had has been the result of my walking into a place and/or emailing someone and asking for it. Every opportunity I’ve been lucky enough to receive has been the result of my going out and looking for it. I nurture my friendships. I make connections.
And love, too, any amount of it I’ve been lucky or unlucky enough to absorb, has always been the result of my asking for it. In addition to self-love and gratitude, our culture, or at least the venn diagram sections of it I find myself in, is on its, like, 17th wave of feminism, and that wave calls for a super-breed of hyper independent, emotionally healed women to whom sex and romance and partnership is unnecessary and beside the point. We, the women of this feminist generation, have been taught to live loving lives, but, by the same token, we’re told that asking for romantic love is akin to begging for it, and begging for anything negates our power and our very feminist essence.
This, I understand now, is a false comparison. For a while there, I got really good at not asking for love. I thought asking for it made me needy, or clingy, or too much. I thought having to ask for it—not just being awash with it all the time without having to try—meant I was intrinsically unlovable. I thought it was begging. I thought I shouldn’t need it. I thought my love for myself should be enough.
It isn’t loving to avoid love. It’s punishment; it’s self-flagellation. The thing to remember is this: you should always ask, but you won’t always receive. That’s when you walk away. But then you just ask again somewhere else.
