Is love a feeling or is it an action?
Me coping with the bad juju of parasocial break-ups
This is a question I keep returning to. The other day my favourite parasocial couple broke up and of course this was Earth-shattering news for me. If my second favourite parasocial one does too (Andy Samberg and Joanna Newsom), I will have to leave behind my life as I know it. Re-evaluate my entire theory of love.
‘Unfortunately, I want to fall in love.’ laments Stephanie Niu in her poem, The Question. Of crushes, my friend F says, ‘They should be classified as a mental illness.’
I once had a year-long argument with someone I was seeing for a year because he said that he was unavailable because he was still getting over someone that he met and fell in love with after one date while visiting overseas, and I accused him of being avoidant and also stupid and deluded by illusory love, and then it happened to me, and I was like, oh.
I mean I was right — I probably also was avoidant and stupid and deluded — but at that point it didn’t even matter. I’d been infected. All rational faculties abandoned me; I could only savor the madness and hope that I would emerge from it relatively un-maimed.
F asked what the difference between a crush and love is and I said “love is being able to be truly held by someone” — you can’t be held by a crush. The crush is about aching, uncertainty, becoming unmoored from the banality of your real life into whirlwind, ecstatic possibility. ‘Being swept off your feet,’ as they say.
One thing I have maybe figured out so far is that in relationship you take on roles without realising, at least not until the pressure is on. Whose ambitions are coming first now? Who gets to dream and who has to be in reality? Who is dismissive and who is aggressive? Who is the one who says ‘we’ when you say ‘I’?
You could say that ideal relationships are equal all you like, but that glosses over all the time and effort put into making it equal: there is no gloopy, beige-coloured egalitarianism to be found, not here, not in hetero relationships, not in queer ones, not in multiracial socialist utopia, not anywhere. Equality is rarely a static mode so much as it is a negotiation, and on the same note, it can never be dictated top down by one party.
There is no instant equality because no one can know and ask for what it is you most desire, none other than yourself. D said, “Love is being unafraid to bump into eachother,” it’s announcing again and again that being close to each other is worth the price of conflict, that the transformation promised by this person is worth the amount of predicted maiming to your person. Romance, to Becca Rothfeld, comprises the “cycle of me changing you, the changed you changing me, the changed me changing the changed you, and so on.”
It seems fair to imagine couples fight and break up when they realise the role they have taken isn’t playing out the way they want it to, it’s suffocating and tiring, and there are no other good ones on offer. Negotiation has stopped, and one or both feel that a role has been forced on them instead of improvised together. I’m sick of being the flexible one! I’m sick of being the ‘bad guy’! And it’s your fault!
Relationships come with a certain amount of misapprehension of the difference between the role one is playing, and who they really are: one has been thoroughly mistaken about the size of the other’s ambition; the seriousness of their emotions; the true extent of their heroic powers as they pertain to your personal rescue.
And at the same time that interstice of ignorance is what makes relationship possible at all. Indeed you underplayed your ambitions because you wanted to be ‘easygoing’! Indeed you squished your worry down so you could be ‘cool with whatever’! Indeed you took on this silly little role because you didn’t mind so much at the time, you just wanted to have an excuse to stick around, loitering and pretending to know how to help them with their math homework!
And that ignorance is also important because it’s where fantasy ferments, that substance of attraction which draws you to each other at all. It’s the place where you fall in love with the ideal of the other, the potential and mystery, and the ideal even of yourself that is signified in the other person.
The only thing one can do when confronted with their egregious misperception of the other is to ask: now that I see you, can I really make room for who you really are? And will you do the same for me? And will I sort my shit out now?
I guess that’s why I think that love is an action.
My belief is also a personal failing, in that I’m suspicious of effortlessness in general.
To me, agency is tangled up with struggle. To struggle is to win, even if you lose. To fight, complain and thrash idiotically about things I care about to assert some kind of point of view. Stupidity is at least more passionate than the numbness of resignation, of dropping out too early. The only downside of stupidity, is that it is stupid.
Grand proclamations of love put me on guard because ease puts me on guard. But small statements take up my entire world. “My favourite is when we walk and talk.” That is the most loved I have ever felt. Give me something real, something that I can touch, that I confirm is there. Something I have no room to doubt.
The last time B and I fought was partly because I got upset without realising it that we didn’t have enough time to have that inane chatter that is long and idle and boring like light rain scattered throughout the night; if I had to venture what the basic fabric of a relationship is I would answer it is this, inane chatter. I have always very much liked asking him questions because he answers instantly, confidently and is never disturbed by why I might want to know: do you enjoy small talk? what is the longest you’ve driven on your motorcycle? why do you think they make the ceilings in airports so high? I don’t think it’s that I particularly need accurate answers or any of that so much as I want to send a signal out to space and hear a reply.
Imagine every time you meet someone you have an instant spark with, a portal opens up.
For how long it will stay open, you have no idea. You have to choose to jump inside with them or not. You could make an educated guess about whether they’re good for you or not, but you only know what you know. You don’t know if they’ll teach you how to love, edit your writing, become good friends with your mother, meet you in Osaka, call you when someone you love dies. You just don’t know, until one day you fly out the other end of the portal and you’re like: Oh, I don’t know how I’d live without you.
But you don’t want to really jump in the portal because of what will happen, do you?
You want to jump in precisely because you don’t know what will happen.
Love is a feeling — how could you possible control when that portal will open up? How can you control the way it beckons you? How can you control its gravity?
Love is an action — are you willing to jump? Are you willing to be open to the possibility of ruining your life just a little bit?