This is everything. It is everything I have been thinking about and crying about and trying to write about these past few weeks. Last night in bed with someone I’ve been seeing I started to sob and I couldn’t quite understand why–why I was crying and why I felt so embarrassed letting him see me that way, messy mascara and reddened cheeks and the ugliness of vulnerability. To let someone see your weakness automatically grants them the agency to hurt you. It has been three months but I am not ready to be hurt again. Not right now. Not yet.
After reading this interview I know what I was trying to say to him last night, in between the apologies for “being crazy” and the jokes meant to derail my own derailment. It had nothing and everything to do with him–nothing because he could be anyone, everything because he is the perfect metaphor for my own internal contradictions: for the first time in a long time, I have no idea what I want.
Recently, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about different theories of love, two of which Ned graciously parsed for me on Philoblog. Thinking about love in purely scientific terms simultaneously gets me off and makes me depressed. I love reading the cut-and-dry ways people describe really hulking, emotionally charged subjects like “falling in love” on Wikipedia. There’s something amusing and almost charming about trying to define these really undefinable concepts in scientific terms.
Wikipedia describes “falling in love” as “the process of moving from a feeling of neutrality towards a person to one of love.” How clinical! Granting only scientific credence to a concept that dominates so much of our drive to live is sociopathic in some ways. Love is chemical, sure, but I refuse to believe that the men that I’ve loved–the people that I’ve loved–have only etched their meaning into my life because of the way my brain reacts to them.
I’m really attracted to the Alberoni Theory of Love, which states that “people fall in love when they are ready to change, or to start a new life.” In this way, falling in love is really a choice. We tend to think that “the heart wants what it wants,” which is true, but you have to be willing to let the heart want in order for it to want! You don’t necessarily choose to love, but you choose to be capable of loving. I have dated far too many men who have refused to make this choice.
When I was 20 years old I was young enough to believe that it was still possible to invent new ways to love, ways which no one else in history had conceived of before. Lying in bed with my Macbook at night, “long distance” seemed like a concept that had lost its definitional punch. What was distance but a physical longing, one that we could now abate by a simple click of the keyboard? When I was 20 I had more faith in Skype than I did in neck kisses.
In the beginning long distance was easy: our veins lay out quietly like cables beneath the sea, transcontinental passages for messages to strike through. I woke up as he was coming home from work, our internal clocks ticking in mismatched rhythms, and we were happy every day. We sang Joy Division together on the telephone. “My mother thinks that you are pretty, too pretty for me,” he said, “and that this will surely end badly.” But he had the softest hands!
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