The Question of Love

A collection of my miscellaneous thoughts about love

When I loved, it was almost as if I experienced a rebirth. I had gone through a metamorphosis almost overnight and quite suddenly within the short space of time it took me to fall in love, two very different versions of myself existed; who I had been before I met him, and who I became after.

I do not think I experienced love at first sight, rather that I experienced the sensation of seeing him for the first time and knowing that I was going to fall in love with him. After poring through the internet trying to a find a word that describes this particular feeling, I finally found the phrase I had seen once before, years ago, and tried to find.

‘Koi No Yokan – 恋の予感

‘Koi no yokan’ refers to the sense that we have just met a person with whom we will inevitably fall in love. Japanese speakers think of ‘Koi no yokan’ as a premonition of love, solely based upon the feeling that you get after you have met someone and imagine forever with them.’ (Interecho.) There is an English word I had found upon my first search, but I felt its definition was too clinical and lacking in romanticism (the word is 'Limerence.') The West loves to pioneer itself as the champion of romance and yet there are no Western words that can accurately describe what I felt for this individual as well as Koi No Yokan.

I said multiple times that I felt almost as if I had already known him, and had loved him before, and was merely meeting him again somewhere else, in some other life. In as much as I was always on a perpetual journey of knowing and learning him, it had begun to feel as though he had always been a fixture in my life, just somewhere in the background, but always there. It was not difficult to imagine a future with him, I didn’t have to strain my mind to imagine ten years from now, twenty, thirty and so forth. This is coming from an individual who struggled to imagine anything a few months ahead. It was as though when I met him I was jolted into some kind of action. This isn’t to say that I did absolutely nothing in my life prior to meeting him. I went to school, I had friends, I went out (infrequently) with said friends and read books and made art and did whatever a human being of that age is supposed to do. However, when I met him, my life, which had been considerably greyscale, got thrown into a shock of Technicolor.

I fell deeply, madly in love. I wanted to write sonnets about him, about his smile, which is a little bit like Amine’s, with a slight overbite, and the beauty spots on his arms. I read all the great novels, and highlighted quote after quote about love, some of which I’ve attached onto this post. One of my closest friends is always reiterating how amazing it is that I got to experience what she says is “the love of [my] life,” even if it didn’t end the way I had hoped. Having been a good friend to both myself and my partner at the time, she recently said in a conversation we were having about love, “I can safely say I witnessed a whirlwind romance…I witnessed young love, from the first day, to some degree the last day.” And it’s true that she did, she was there on my first ‘date’ with him when I jumped out of her car and laid eyes on him and had the wind knocked out of me. That night I woke up at around 1 am and began to frantically message her about how I thought “this was it” for me and how I felt so strongly for him that I immediately wanted to change and become a better person for him. I felt as though he was such a good pure person that I never wanted any poison I had acquired from my trauma to taint him; this perfect angelic creature.

Love is about evolution. Change. Growth. The will to be different. I was not a perfect partner, and will not waste anybody’s time convincing them my relationship was perfect; it was not. I have a proclivity towards manipulation, and can fail to healthily communicate in relationships (romantic and otherwise.) After becoming aware of these things, I tried very hard to work on them, I knew I wanted a seriously long term partnership with this person. I had never viewed myself as a romantic, and yet I wrote more in the duration of our relationship than I had ever written in my entire life. I wanted to write, to paint, to sculpt, not just about him, but about life. Suddenly the leaves on the trees seemed to glimmer with green, the world became so interesting, and bursting with possibilities and an optimism I was unfamiliar with.

I felt an almost motherly sense of protection over him. I didn’t like his friends that I felt bullied him or tried to intimidate him, and went out of my way to bring nothing but joy into his life. I wanted nothing more than his happiness, nothing more than to watch him grow, to witness his greatest successes and all the failures behind them.

Now, I often wonder how other relationships in the future will compare to this one, how they will compare to the immediate connection I felt with him, to the deep passion we shared, such a passion I felt for him that once on our way home I just began to cry, actual body wracking sobs. I was taken aback and embarrassed by this kind of extravagant display of emotion, I hated crying in public, and try to do so as little possible, and yet I cried so much that he stopped the car in the middle of the road (it was a country road that rarely ever saw traffic besides cows and goats and such) and began to comfort me. Meeting him, and the subsequent relationship that followed, was like coming home, taking my shoes off at the door and feel the toasty warmth of my dwelling envelope me. Attempting to interact with other people romantically often has the same feeling of shouting behind strong glass, or through water; empty, frustrating and pointless.

What is Love?

While journaling about a month ago, doing shadow work in particular, I came across the prompt, "What is love in your own definition?" This prompt sent me down a rabbit hole where I asked many of my friends to define love for me, because after writing down what it meant to me, I realized love means many different things to many different things to many people. For myself, love is tranquility. It is safety that perseveres. To be loved is to be known, to be seen, to be understood. I recall the quote "Sometimes I believe love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe love is an act of will." This is from Heartburn, by Nora Ephron. To love is not merely to feel, but to decide. To decide to be committed to something. Love is kinship.

A friend of mine used the analogy of love being an ever present bench, one that you can always revisit, and don't have to sit on to know that it is there.  

I then asked the questions, What makes romantic relationships so special? What exactly makes them so different? Why do we require ourselves to constantly feel love actively in romantic relationships? I hardly ever feel overwhelmed by love for my family, and yet I know that I love them. One might say that this is because I share blood with these people and so I will always feel love for them, I will always feel bonded to them. But this is also the case with my chosen family, which consists of my friends. It is not every day that I actively feel love for them, when my emotions are stirred by them and I feel like capturing the moon and the stars for them. This doesn't mean that I don't care for them on the days that I feel love passively and not actively. And yet I am not cutting them off when my love for them has strayed from the proverbial bench, and has taken a walk around the garden that is life to view the greenery. 

Nobody could give me an answer to this. One might say that capitalism influences how we view romantic relationships. We have been fed love story after love story by the media of love as burning passion, and so we are not able to conceive the fact that love is also quiet; it is also peace, it is the bench empty, but not forgotten while those who sit on it wander about on their business, knowing they will return to it when they have to. Capitalism is fast paced, a series of fads, one quickly replacing the other; be here, then there, then there. The art of constantly replacing one thing with the other, of chasing after some unattainable thing; wealth, prosperity, time, the perfect relationship. We are never content with the simple state of just being, being still in that moment with the one(s) we love without chasing after some other goal, some other desire. The grass is greener on the other side is a perfect summary of this 'romantic capitalism', and I use this term loosely because capitalism already affects every aspect of our lives and so it is quite unnecessary to use the term romantic capitalism. I'm just using this for more clarity. 

Media, influenced by capitalism has hardly ever portrayed the reality of long term commitments, that after a while this fervor might fizzle out, but the absence of this passion is not equal to an absence of love. Being no expert in long term relationships, but merely an observer, I do not believe that it is possible to be with someone, or someones if one is polyamorous, for an extended period of time without the parties of that relationship essentially, leaving the bench. The excitement and passion that accompanies initially getting to know someone cannot be expected to have any type of sustainable longevity. Like I said before, I'm not an expert on long term relationships, having been a spectacular failure at them so far, and so it could be entirely possible, in fact regular, that people in long term romantic partnerships actively feel in love with their partners every single day of their relationship. However, I would be so bold as to say it is improbable, even impossible to feel such a thing for anyone, even your dog. We are human beings, our emotions are unstable and even the earth, as old and wizened as it is, is in a constant cycle of change. As I type, waves weather shores, the African plate diverges into the Somali plate and the Nubian plate, and even the universe steadily approaches its own death. 

I will attempt to poorly paraphrase what my friend, who told me the analogy of the bench said. She said love the feeling can be built off of a foundation of other things. Stability, safety, reassurance etc. It is unwise to build relationships with people based solely off of feelings, which are fleeting and change as the weather changes. It is necessary, in my opinion, to have laid a foundation for one's relationship that does not include feelings, such that when (yes when, not if) those feelings are not present, it does not affect this relationship. Now imagine if we held our platonic relationships to the same ridiculous standard as our romantic ones. We would be trapped in a dizzyingly repetitive cycle of losing and acquiring friends every week. 

I recommend that you also read the article, 'What is Couple's Privilege?' on Open Relating. I have dedicated an obscene amount of time, time only an unemployed person (such as I) has to trying to find some kind of explanation for the bizarre 'relationship phenomenon.' Capitalism tends to place everything under the sun in a category. We exist in a world of hierarchies, and in the hierarchy of relationships, romantic relationships sit pretty at the top. 'Couples Privilege' may explain why this is so. We are taught to aspire to be in a pair; to be one half of a whole. We are taught that all the other relationships in our lives do not matter, do not need as much work put into them, do not need to be sustained with constant feelings and declarations of passion in the same way as romantic relationships. This may be why when we enter real relationships, there is a clash between what we think the relationship should be, and what love should look like, fed by capitalist media, and what the reality of these relationships looks like.

I often re-examine whether the feelings I described in the end of the first segment are truly my own. Did I feel like I could never connect intimately with other people because that was truly the person I felt understood and knew me best, or because I've been taught to believe in 'the one' by the world (read capitalism) and cannot internalize the idea of multiple people being able to love me as deeply. Accepting that it's not just this one individual who can cater to my needs and vice versa means putting the final nail in the coffin and ultimately moving on. More importantly, it means unlearning everything I have been taught about love. That love is not just a feeling, that it's not only one person who will know how to love you properly, and that love can even be created and nurtured, it's not just a rare falling rock from the sky that you can experience once and only once. This is much harder to navigate as a spiritual person, because soulmates and twin flames etc., are also common themes in multiple kinds of spirituality.

As a consumer of romantic media: literature, paintings, music, plays, films and television, I can affirm that romance and love always walk hand in hand with the feeling of passion. As a creator of romantic media, when I was 'in love' I also fed into this capitalist dystopia by always writing about my passion. We make art about falling love, but never about the work one must put in to stay in love. When I say 'work', please divorce this from the capitalist view of work. Under capitalism, work is tiring and back breaking labor, and we are often told to expect to put this amount of labor (especially women, and much worse black women) in order to get a successful relationship. As an example, I create visual art in my spare time. I like to paint, but unlike writing, which comes more naturally to me, I have to put in a decent amount of work to be a 'good' artist. I have to practice sketching, painting methods etc., and it can be frustrating work when I cannot master a particular concept as quickly as I want to. I would think of relationships (in general, not just romantic ones) as requiring this type of effort; a labor of love, if you will.

I wrote countless love letters and sonnets and prose about how madly in love I was with my partner. I never wrote about the times I left the bench, when I knew that I loved him but did not feel this love stirring in the depths of my spirit. When the love I felt for my partner was similar to the love I felt for my family and friends, and in as much as I knew I loved him, I just did not feel it. I never wrote about these things, and so subconsciously also fed into the same system that, like a bird feeding its children, feeds us falsehoods about relationships that aim to keep us chasing the capitalist dream of the perfect relationship. 

If I do not attempt to maintain my friendships they will fizzle out and end. In my opinion, platonic relationships are built on much stronger foundations than their romantic counterparts. I do not have to constantly expend my energy on my friends to validate my internal feelings of love for them. I do not have to speak to my friends every day to validate my internal feelings of love for them. I do not end my friendships with them nor enter an internal crisis when I don't feel in love with them. I love my family, and I know that, but I don't feel deliriously in love with them every day. You're probably saying, "But Tako you idiot, romantic relationships are just different from platonic ones, so the rules are different." Okay, but why are they different? By whose and which metric have we decided that romantic partnerships are simply higher on the relationship hierarchy? Why can we love our friends, and still make more of them, and understand that each friendship is unique, but we cannot apply this same logic to romantic relationships.

I'm not saying polyamory is for everyone, even after unlearning toxic traits that fuel monogamy in our society such as possessiveness, insecurity and jealousy, you might still find yourself leaning towards monogamy. The entire point of this is not to force anyone to do anything, but rather to question the way we view love, romance and relationships. We have only this one chance to live, and cannot allow capitalism to rob us of the chance to love and experience being loved in ways that bring fulfilment to our spirits.