Cool, so, Love Songs Make Sense Now

I know this is cringey, but I finally get it.

I’m Vanna White-ing my boyfriend. I’m not sure what he’s Vanna White-ing. The trees, I guess.

Lamenting the experience of infatuation was a common refrain for Past Taylor, usually expressed in frustration to Georgette. The cycle was almost comical in its predictability:

1. Meet a human who makes me feel fluttery.
2. Get excited.
3. Experience the acute panic of “what if this goes away?”
4. Get scared.
5. Feel a stab of visceral heartache approximately every 5 minutes.
6. Text G, “crushes are bullshit and I hate them.”

Ever my patient companion, Georgette would encourage me to reframe, turn the heartaches into heartsighs. (Thank you, G.)

“Falling is supposed to be fun,” she’d remind me. “I know it’s hard, but maybe try to lean into the flutters of a crush instead of fretting about the future?”

I tried my best to find levity in romance. It never worked. Not really. I’d get too attached to outcomes. Even outcomes that maybe aren’t the ones to which I should attach myself.

(Again. I’m doing my best.)

Romantic beginnings, for me, have historically involved more pain than joy. The experience of falling, intentionally leaning into vulnerability with someone new, caused past scars from love-turned-toxic to smart anew. Fear would flood in, pushing aside any comfort or levity I felt in the experience.

I used to think that I was too bruised to feel anything but fraught about love. That every new partnership involved a three-to-six-month period of feeling mostly pain and fear before we were “out of the woods.” I always wished that I could skip the falling-in-love part and fast forward to the moment where we decide to exit purgatory.

(HAAAAAHAHAHAHA OKAY, PAST TAYLOR.)

That’s not love. That’s… I don’t know what that is. A bad business deal, maybe, involving the operations of life instead of work.

I think my subconscious always foresaw a painful end in my romantic entanglements. But instead of alerting me to those alarm bells in a productive way, it reminded me of all the times I was hurt, inviting in more pain instead of action to sidestep the worst of the heartache.

This feels like one of those shoulda-been-obvious moments. But as my aunt says, it shouldn’t be obvious, because lessons like these have to be felt via experience, not academically understood through the words of others.

I understand now that I’d never felt the earth-shattering, world-lighting, everything-changing kind of love.

I thought I had. I really thought I had.

In comparison to this love, what I’ve had is a dull proxy.

I’m a determined sort and I spent many months (ok fine, more like a decade) trying to shove square pegs into round holes. See?! This totally fits, I’d tell myself, ignoring the empty spaces and sharp, poking edges, reminding myself I’d been through a hell of a lot worse. I figured that’s just what love felt like — sacrifice and logic and compromise and intentional choice — nothing else. Dismissing matters of the heart as unsustainable infatuation.

When I met Austin, the man who changed absolutely everything about my understanding of love, I’d just returned from a month-long stint in Europe. I spent my time abroad exploring, finding joy, and healing romance-related bruises.

I danced through the streets of Budapest, aglow with the joy of indulging curiosity on my own. I sat with my feet in the icy cold Danube river, whispering a note of gratitude to the universe along with a quieter wish for romantic love. I spent train journeys writing with silent tears pouring down my face, staring at fields of yellow flowers I hoped a partner would one day tuck into my hair, occasionally grabbing Jenn’s hand as she let her own wishes pour out of her into prose.

In April, I journaled,

I’m sitting on the train from Brno to Praha, holding back the tears that I know will flow freely as I continue to type. Jenn is taking a picture of me because this moment is poignant for both of us. I won’t cry in her photo. But I will cry soon.

The photo Jenn took as I tried not to cry on the train, brow furrowed, jaw set, Czech countryside whizzing by our window.

“It’s like I’m counting contractions,” I told Jenn as we strolled through the Moravian streets yesterday, occasionally pausing to admire Baroque ironwork or gothic spires. “I’ve never been through labor, but it feels like something is hitting me every minute or so, uninvited and all-consuming, sometimes physically painful.”

She agreed that heartsickness feels something akin to the process of childbirth. It’s poignant and poetic. It’s beautiful and it hurts like hell.

We’re both crying now. We’re both writing. We write to breathe, and in order to breathe we must cry. Sometimes we catch the other’s eye, wipe away tears, take a moment to witness the pain in the other, and continue to write.

When I confessed my bruised-but-healing headspace to Georgette, she told me,

“Sometimes aches have a weird way of feeling sweet and reverential, and you’ll find that point. You’re stretching new feel muscles that you haven’t used in a long time. I am really proud of you for working through everything and exploring the corners, but still giving yourself space to just feel stuff. Because that shit’s hard, and you do it so well. Go, Coil!”

I am so grateful for my friends.

“We rode this bike path,” Jenn just told me, as we stare out the window through our tears. There’s a little path next to the train next to the river by the mountain. She rode through this stretch of Czech countryside ten years ago with her husband and four kids during their years of full-time travel. “It was dirt when we rode it, but we rode it. I can’t believe that was a decade ago. People tell you that time just disappears and in the moment, it never feels like that can possibly be real, but wow. It does. just. disappear.”

Our minds meandered through silent thought, lost in memory and in dreams, and the bike paths turned to dirt, just as Jenn predicted. They were riddled with potholes. “Fucking. Czech,” she swore.

“You’d almost need a mountain bike for that path,” I said, laughing. And then my face crumpled.

Emotional contraction. A bad one. This time it’s a flash of searing pain after the constant ache that comes with writing about lost love, not just a little twinge out of nowhere.

“Breathe through it,” Jenn said. “I can tell that one hurt.”

Holy hell, Past Taylor. Why did I think that’s what I wanted? Why did I miss someone who made me feel like that?

Two months ago, I thought that’s what relationships felt like. That’s what my mid-to-late-twenties relationships always felt like. Pain and determination and resilience and sure, some moments of joy. Feeling seen, but not cherished. Assuming the act of convincing someone to choose you was part of the process in modern dating.

As my friend James would say, woooof, Tay.

You live and you learn, I guess.

Today, I see that investment of energy for what it was: misplaced.

Because today, I know what real love feels like.

I understand the sheer power of a perfect fit. I nod in understanding, not bemusement, when lovers speak of partnership as peace, comfort, deeply fulfilling companionship. I understand the beauty in art inspired by “romance with a capital R,” as Austin calls it. I know what it feels like to be seen, fulfilled, united with another person in life and soul. I know what it feels like to thrive in love.

Not making it work. Not tolerating life. Not resigning myself to an actually-kind-of-terrible shared existence because, in the moment, it feels slightly better than being alone.

It’s never better than being alone. Not really.

I know how to do the work in a relationship. This time, I’m going to do it with the right person. And with the right person, it’s hardly work. So far, at least. I have no delusions that it’ll never feel like work.

(That’s you, Austin!!!! You’re my “right person.” You know that. But I’m going to keep telling you that.)

His welcoming arms are home. His sparkling eyes are doors to my future. His gentle, melodic voice is my heart’s song, his crinkle-eyed laugh is my spirit’s joy. His kiss is reverence — an appreciation of today, and a promise of a happy life tomorrow, and the next day, and all the ones after that.

There’s that crinkle-eyed laugh.

Every time Austin tells me he loves me, that he’s choosing me, that he’s going to keep choosing me, I nearly cry with happiness. Sometimes I do actually cry with happiness. Sometimes I forget to say it back because I’m too busy crying with happiness.

(That probably sounds incredibly un-chill, but hey hi, nice to meet you, my name is Taylor and I feel everything.)

I am not fraught. My scars are (mostly) healed, not throbbing with panic. I trust him, and he trusts me. I see him, and he sees me.

I love him, and he loves me.

I know what that means now. What love is supposed to mean beyond just action and choice. What love is supposed to feel like. What romance is supposed to feel like.

Howdy, partner.

I’m so glad everything that wasn’t this ended so that I could live our love story. I’m so glad I get to love this person, honored I get to choose him. Overwhelmed with gratitude that he’s choosing me, too.

Did everyone know about this already?

It feels like everyone else in the world knew love wasn’t supposed to hurt like I thought it was supposed to hurt. And, maybe, that everyone tried to tell me.

How many love songs went right over my head? How many poems, movies, paintings, letters, novels, melodies, ballets, pieces of art attempted to show me how beautiful companionship can be?

Come on, Coil, ya giant dingus. It was all right in front of you. How did I get it so wrong for so long?

But hey! I’ve caught up. The right person took my hand, changed my perspective, and my heart got there. It just… took 29 years. But I get it now. And more importantly — I FEEL it.

I hope you feel it, too. I hope you have felt it. I hope you will feel it.

Because this changes everything.