My friend told me once that with 8 billion hearts alive, breaking, healing, beating all at once, how is every story not a love story?
Buzzfeed tells me to “Pick foods for your wedding buffet, and we’ll tell you what season you’ll get married in!”, or to “pick this or that, and we will predict what age you’ll get married!” I, like most hopeless romantics my age, have spent countless quarantined hours reflecting on the state of romance and the relevancy of relationships—platonic, familial, and otherwise—but I would be amiss if I didn’t mention that it seems like the past few months have seen more marriages, erotic television shows, and yearning to have a somebody than I can remember.
Maybe it’s a mix of graduating college, being socially and physically starved, and the compounding effect of me and all my single friends saying we’re completely fine single but then bring it up all. the. time. The longing to be in a relationship haunts us in a way like we long for the softness of a childhood friendship now only existing to us as a memory, a dream; yet it carries with it all the hopeless romanticisms fed to us: the best friends turned lovers, the tension between two opposites as they attract, the exciting passion, the quiet security.
Relationships linger in the space between our realities and our imaginations, and in that space, anything and nothing happens all at once, as we imagine what could be and what it must feel like to be wanted, loved, covered. And in this space of is and could be, we find knotted stomachs and skipped heart beats—quite frankly, moments of excitement in otherwise mundane and predictable weeks.
Then there’s the added dimension of time. It exists as a single directional linearity, moving forwards perpetually and never looking back. High school, college, and now on the precipice of professional adulthood ™, I am making decisions that will pave the way for what the next five years of my life will look like. At 22, the impetus to get a move on with my life makes me wonder what a timeline for my life looks like and whether I should just take things as they come or relentlessly pursue what I want until I get it. (The answer, of course, is a happy median between the two, but poetically that just doesn’t sound as nice.)
Behind my circuitous thoughts, though, is the question what is love? What does it feel like? And trying to define it is perhaps as meaninglessly poetic as trying to describe a memory to someone who wasn’t there. How you can instill the color of the sunset on a high school date to Santa Cruz? Imbue the feeling of dimmed lights before a movie comes on? How can you express the smell of desperation in a testing room in mere adjectives and letters?
Well, my friends, you’ve made it this far, so you might be just like me, with a palette ready to taste test some ruminations on love.
Here’s a rather silly running list of what I’ve got:
Love is always texting first and not minding or worrying if you’re being annoying.
Love is as sharp as winter air on your nose and as soft as heat radiating from the campfire as it warms your knees and your cup of coco as it warms your hands.
Love is early morning car rides to the beach.
Love is the rhythmic clapping of the ocean underneath you, the confidence of the waves, the fear of the infinitude of mysteries down below.
Love is two bodies barely brushing arms and feeling so small beneath eons and eons of stars.
Love is the difference between a fluttering heart when asked does he like me, or does he like like me, and the non-dramatic steadfastness of a text that reads lol this meme reminds me of you.
Love is knowing someone’s pizza or boba order and leaving it as a surprise for whenever they see it, even if they’ve been a huge ass. Just because.
Love is silence as thick as San Francisco fog when being present speaks decibels louder than any hollowed-out platitudes.
Love is grocery shopping and meals around the table and snacks brought home from work.
Love is safety and respect, patience and boundaries, a constant pushing to make each other better. It’s gentle and soft yet strong and sure. Like a banana.
Love is realizing that you are sunflowers and that even if there is no sun, you will always turn towards each other.
It is your number one fan, your fail safes, and sometimes your conscience when you’ve been inside your own head too much. It holds your fire when you’re worried you might blow it out or that you don’t have enough kindle to protect it through the night; it fans the flame with a shared laugh or a gentle pat on the head; it brings the blaze down when it’s all passion and nothing else.
We are skin-hungry, affirmation-seeking, laugh-loving creatures who, above all, yearn to feel seen—to know others and be known in return*. And there sure is a lot that we don’t know. Sure is a lot of future we have no way of predicting. So to know something as sure as being loved?
That’s what we want.
*and trust me, the science backs it up: Humans are incredibly social creatures. In fact, we are actually genetically wired to be near and around people basically constantly. You know how in Among Us there’s that one task where you need to connect the wires fast enough so that you’re not killed mid-task or something? Well, when we’re born, our brains are a little like that. Our neural networks have yet to form the connections that link characteristics like kindness, nurture, care, comfort, all those feeling you feel when you’re around someone you love—the feeling a lot of us felt as kids when we were around our parents. Babies (and all of us, by extension) learn to love and rely on others partially because when they (we) cry, we are comforted; in essence, we learn that when we are in distress, there will be someone who will come to us, comfort us, hold us. Conversely, when babies cannot build this connection (say, for instance, they were left alone for hours when they cried), their brain lacks the wires that spark the release of happy and love hormones when we are around others, meaning that they have an inhibited ability to empathize, feel emotions, love and care for others in a great capacity.
Neurologically, we have special types of brain cells called “mirror neurons”, and they do what you can expect them to do—very monkey-see-monkey-do type of work. For example, when you’re talking to someone you like or someone you want to impress, often we find ourselves mimicking their body language. Mirror neurons help us read and understand body language cues that tell us if we can like someone, if we need to run, and how, essentially, to “read the room” and respond appropriately.
We can even take this a step back and look at our species evolutionarily. Hundreds of generations ago, traveling alone would get you killed, and collaborating in groups has paved the way for civilizations to emerge: pooling resources, sharing food, sharecropping, bartering—all are key features in each stage of civil evolution.
Basically I think the biology of social interactions are fascinating, and I will devour any book you recommend along those lines and talk your ear off about the subject entirely.
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