The interesting thing about writing on love is everyone does it.
From Sappho to Steel, Shakespeare to Sparks.
Love comes in as many forms as people. My love differs intensely from person to person because how can I love one person as they are in the same way I love an entirely different person as they are? It’s one of the most fascinating aspects. It’s not one size fits all but tailored like haute couture. Which is likely the reason us artists are so very obsessed with it.
My words are love letters to lovers and friends and family and even those who hurt me. Love is expansive and difficult to pin down. Putting that feeling into a tangible for public consumption is the greatest challenge an artist faces. How do I show every intricacy and depth of love I have for my fiancée? How do I tell the vastness and unconditionality of love I have for my best friend? How do I adequately portray the shame of still loving the man who hurt me violently? How do I illustrate the grief of loving parents I cannot include in my life but will always include in my heart? I could spend a lifetime writing about the love I feel for a singular person, but I don’t just love one person, so how do I choose what stories to tell? I can’t. I write the best I can.
We’re all trying to figure it out and create some art along the way and just maybe immortalize ourselves with just how much we love someone. At the end of the day, very few of us are Emily Dickinson… We kind of like the idea of our names being known for eternity, and even better if we can give our love an eternity we aren’t lucky enough to possess as mortals. Although, Emily found her way into everlasting fame without even trying. I wonder what it’s like to be so unrelentingly talented?
Writing about something so profoundly personal without sounding clichéed or falling into trope is hard. Like, really hard. I want to do it well. I want to say what I feel without sounding cloyingly obnoxious. I’m just trying to figure out how to infuse a love-soaked anything with the giggles of smiling into an intimate moment. Because love is joyful and fun. It doesn’t and shouldn’t be all yearning and pining and devastating. The best sex is the kind you dip your head into her hip bone with giggles because it’s fun and funny, yet never losing momentum or passion. The best friendships are the ones where sadness and grief and anger and all those big feelings we turn to them with can be validated yet poked fun at enough to give perspective and levity. Those moments are not prevalently portrayed in art. The simplicity of existing in love with others.
Some storytellers’ love lasts the test of time and so many disappear within mere years. What makes it good? Who is our generation’s Austen and Tolstoy? So often, books and art about love and loving feel redundant. The same thing over and over with varying details. Lovers whisper the words of Neruda. We binge watch yet decry Hallmark movies as cringey. Whether it’s critically acclaimed or a guilty pleasure, we consume love stories with a veracity large enough to sustain a multi-billion dollar industry—romance novels alone made $1.44 billion in 2021, and it’s only a growing market.
I want to write about love well. I want to explain all love is meaningful and has its place. Not all love is happily ever after. Most of us have loves before “I do.” Some have love after “I do.” Some friendships last the test of time. I have best friends I don’t talk to anymore but could write about the love I have for them for the rest of my life. Sometimes the happiest ending is a break up. And not all breakups are romantic. Not all love stories are forever, but that doesn’t mean they’re not just as important. Love is vast.
Sometimes, I write things I like but then immediately hope are not the most uncomfortable thing in the world. Like, “Not being able to wake up, tuck my head into the space between your neck and shoulder, breathe you in, and feel you snuggle into me is the greatest displeasure of my life.” I cringe a little reading that, but I think I would love it if someone felt that about me, and I also mean it like crazy. I know why I wrote that. But the context of it changes the meaning and varietal of love so drastically. This love could be so many kinds of love. Love that is grief of knowing you’ll never have that moment again with a death. Love that is yearning for someone after a breakup, which is an entirely different kind of grief. Love that is desire in a long distance relationship. Love that is parenthood. Love that is wanting the dog on the floor to be snuggled in bed instead… because ‘I feed you dammit!’ I love putting love in context. But also, you’ll read that and you’ll be the narrator with someone in mind. Or you’ll want to be the one being missed.
That’s the most fun about writing on love… We feel it in our bodies because it’s something we have experience with and chase and romanticize and hate. Writing about love is fun because it’s hard and yet the most relatable thing in the world. It spans culture and color and socio-economic background and religion and sexual orientation. It is universal. Love connects us.
Romantic is a label I have fought and, for years, easily avoided. I am not known as a sentimental woman. As a woman who writes from a feminist lens in a world beholden to the patriarchy, writing about love feels prescriptive. Expected. I want to be a serious writer, and serious writers don’t write about silly things like love. I’m sure Dante has something to say on that. But he was a man not burdened by the weight of provoking a society actively keeping women’s things in the women’s thing area. Love is often spoken of as if it’s a silly thing women titter over in our beribboned alcoves to diminish it by making it a target of women’s admiration. No one is forcing men to propose. Though not all marriages are love matches, I have a sneaking suspicion, a whole lot of those very serious, down-to-business men are pretty excited to bend the knee. We’re all fools in love. But also, writing about love is always equated to romantic love, and that’s just not true. I write about how much I love my dogs all the time.
I have written about so many topics throughout the eras of my life thus far. From international business to social justice to tech to weed to natural disasters to coffee. I have always written about love. I cannot figure that bitch out. Going through my writing, love is the motivating undercurrent in every piece. Love for country, love for humanity, love for family, love for justice, love for people. Through my work as a lens of introspection, it’s hard to not think of myself as a massive romantic. Instead of turning from that, I’ll carry it like a banner. It’s my challenge to write about love and do it well.
So, will I be a Brontë?