Maybe LOVE isn't really real

I loved you, but now I don't want to even  look at you!

Maybe love  just isn’t real, and maybe that’s the real reason you keep screwin’ it up.

For some time, I imagined love went something  like this: an initial hook up, two people get together, they have a hiccup, they part ways only to realize their errors, then two people come back together for a happily ever after. I hardly ever imagined self-love as a prerequisite. self-love is not in the oversimplified way that social media teaches us, but self-love in the way that you have to look painfully at yourself before you can look and see beauty. for this reason, love isn’t real. it is and  was a lie. a story I told myself because,  like many of you, are  obsessed with safety and eternal happiness, obsessed with looking for a savior (even if I couldn’t admit it). so I made efforts to craft and manipulate romantic situations in order to make up a beautiful love story with a beginning, middle, and an end.

My beginning, of my first serious Love.

Many years ago summer was slowly approaching. I met her at a play audition. we were both late so our seats landed inevitably on the last row. she was on the right side of the room, I was on the left side. we noticed each other, but we were there to support our friends on stage. so we listened, stealing a glance every now and again. or at least I did. She was beautiful. after my fourth stolen glance, I remembered having been ambivalent about coming to the reading that day, I had even remarked to my best friend that I would go only because my futurewife might be there.

So when the event ended. I approached her. with heightened reluctance, I introduced myself and we quickly slipped into a conversation about theatre and art. I learned that she lived in my borough. we didn’t exchange information. So I spent the next week thinking about her, something about her energy landed and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. So, I asked a mutual friend for her information. I called and we  agreed to meet. we spent two-plus hours walking around brooklyn: from bushwick to flatbush to the thin line separating flatbush  and crown heights then back to bushwick. i was excited, for she was a  woman who appreciated simplicity. more than that, she was capable of simplicity. I was sold, or so I thought.

My middle

two weeks later we were kinda sorta a thing. we went to a danced together in a room full of strangers. but we were strangers, unwilling to say so. we needed this beginning. weeks later we were spending most days with one another, thoughtlessly occupying space. a month into things she bolder than I expected and asked me to be her boyfriend. yes, it was as corny as it sounds but I needed corniness because in my mind it indicated vulnerability. I asked if she was sure. she said, “yes.” i smiled and went in for a kiss. I wanted to be her boyfriend regardless of the fact that i felt her uncertainty, but I needed the illusion. days later I saw a picture of her in the Newpaper, walking in Manhattan. I lied about our mutual fears of commitment, later on the phone as I called her to tell her I that I had seen her in the newspaper looking like a movie star. I got a bit  insecure. I went to a party, at my cousins apt. went home with a new  cutie. I felt like I cheated. it was easier than saying “I think we moved too fast.” the months that followed were rocky to the point that we decided to break up. we broke up!

Three months later we decided it was just a hiccup. growing pains. missed each other so reconnected and gave it another shot. we had not done the real work to learn from our mistakes. I’m not sure we were willing. but we were resisting our own silences. so, maybe  just to appease the ego: we agreed that we were not one another’s forever after. we agreed that our first try felt like too much pressure. we agreed that we complicated our ability to be present with one another. so we tried again. slowly falling into old habits of denying the company of our friends. slowly hiding one another away. slowly inviting new lies and secrets and fears. slowly emotionally draining one another. slowly feeling the pressure to be “a thing.”

A year had gone by and the thing that had grown the most was our resentment for one another. one of us felt like we were working so hard at a relationship where the other was a passive participant. one of us feared we were losing our sense of self and autonomy and needed outside reminders of our… mojo. the fears got bigger and the secrets too.

In the end.

I returned to her because I had imagined that I could change myself in order to accept my partner as she was. but she wasn’t my partner. that was the elephant in the room. she could never be. we didn’t want the same things. more than outgrowing one another, we did not trust each other. i’m not sure we trusted ourselves. in hindsight, I was not prepared to meet her that day at the audition.

I’d only imagined myself being ready. within the relationship, I found myself willing to bend without being prompted. I found myself wanting without regarding my own needs. I think she felt this too. I found myself offering space that she never requested or cared to invest in. I found myself feeling uninvited which made me try harder. I even  found myself honoring agreements that she had knowingly and consistently breached. neither of us was in a safe nor brave space and we knew this.

I realized this was the behavior of a person unsure of themselves, unsure of their own reflection. I came to acknowledge that genuine love can never grow under such confines. But nowhere else could I have learned that lesson. in no other way could I have come to terms with the fact that I was an individual not fully convinced of my own magic and charm, thus having nothing else to genuinely offer anybody else. I was given an opportunity to relocate to Chicago, and I left N.Y for good, with no intentions to ever see her again. I met someone else in Chicago and got married 2 years later. 

The metaphor

This modern love thing isn’t really real. not in the way that we imagine it.... because we are often too willing to give up, so much of who and how we are to craft an ideal story. We imagine a love where compromise is only a euphemism for imbalance. but that isn’t love. that is negotiation, negligent negotiation even.

Love will never be real until you find it in yourself. love will never be real if your happily ever exist outside of yourself. love will never be real if you’re looking for a savior versus someone to champion your journey to save yourself, and you must first know that this — saving yourself — is the journey. so instead of thinking of love in terms of wanting someone to complete you.

Let's think of it like  the actrist Eartha Kitt said: “I fall in love with myself and I want someone to share it with me. I want someone to share me with me.” that way no relationship can leave you broken when it ends, instead it offers up a metaphor for understanding ones self a little bit more.

While I am relearning and reimagining what love is, what it looks like, and even how it goes, I know it exists. but the ugly truth is this:

Love is real but we keep messing it up because we refuse to find it in ourselves first.