Fear and Loathing the Uncertain
A while ago, I thought I would write a piece about what love means to different people. I’m always curiously butting into people’s personal lives, (even if they don’t know it. I’m a master of not only Facebook stalking, but Facebook deep-digging in a way that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame), and interviewing people seemed the least abrasive way to learn more. I interviewed my college friends, my high school friends, my family, even an ex. And the responses I got to the question I gave, “How do you define love?” were varied and beautiful, but they weren’t what I was looking to write about. They were too sweet, too idealized. And I’m anything but an optimist, my therapist can tell you that.
Instead, I found some of the answers people get to the question, “Do you love me?” are way more hilarious in a dark sense than a basic definition of love itself, especially when not prompted in an interview format. I realized this while reading an old diary of mine a few weeks ago where I had angrily scribbled the words, “Well, you’re here,” across an entire page. I have a flair for the dramatic that’s really more embarrassing than how artistic I thought I was being at eighteen.
It took me a minute, but looking at the date of the diary entry I connected the quote I had written as the answer I had gotten when I first asked my ex if he loved me. I guess you would call him my ex. We had a fluctuating friendship that resulted in a casual, but effectively exclusive, friends-with-benefits deal lasting several years. Hearts were broken, love(?) was made, we sometimes ate food together that I had cooked poorly, and watched the same shows on illegal websites, commentating to each other in our inescapable and constant stream of Facebook messages and texts. I think that constitutes a relationship despite how shitty it really was. Maybe I should tell my therapist I’m an optimist after all.
But when I asked this boy years ago, “Do you love me?” his response had been, “Well… you’re here.” And in retrospect… That is comedic genius. You cannot make this shit up. I have tears from laughing right now that mock the tears I cried when he first told me this. “Well… you’re here” implies that I wasn’t anything special to him. He didn’t love me. I was just convenient in the time and place of the moment. I was here. How naively pathetic we both were.
If my own early encounter with love had been this misfortunate, I wondered what others had been like and began to pry into my friends’ and family members’ lives as I so often like to do.
My sister confessed to me that her first exchange of, “Do you love me?” had been met with the answer, “Yes… But can we agree it’s on a very low level?”
My cousin snorted as she said an ex-boyfriend had told her she was “the cancer of his life” when she asked him.
I had to hold back my own laughter as a friend told me over lunch in my college apartment that her boyfriend had responded with, “I’m only saying ‘yes’ so you won’t break up with me.” She didn’t think it was funny at all at the time, and they actually dated for several years, but hopefully now that they’re broken up she can read this and giggle with me, just a bit late.
And maybe asking the question, “Do you love me?” is a trap in and of itself. It conveys uncertainty, an anxiety that you know this person may not love you back, or maybe you’re hoping they don’t love you at all because you’re currently entranced with the hipster Starbucks barista from your writing class and not them. (True story, I once swooned so badly in front of a Starbucks barista from my writing class that I made an audible and breathy “ooohhh-aaahhhooo” sound as he took my order. He noticed. My roommate noticed. I have no regrets). The uncertainty of “Do you love me?” leaves room for uncertainty in the answer.
My amazing and current boyfriend flat-out told me he loved me on a hill in a small, Italian village while we were on an archeological dig together. Of course I responded back with the same because I feel the same, I love him too. And even if you don’t have the backdrop to a rom-com movie probably about a forty-year-old divorcee who finds herself through wine and Xanax in the Italian countryside, (I was very fortunate to have this backdrop, minus my lack of wine and Xanax that I made up for on the plane ride home,) you deserve to hear, “I love you” without having to prompt the other to say it. You deserve being able to say it to someone else and be confident it will be met with the same. Or, screw it, say it to yourself in the mirror because love is hard and stuff.
