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Me and love, specifically the romantic kind, have been at odds with each other for as long as I can remember. Of course I now know that other kinds of love hold just as much importance, but I think something about being an only child and not having friends in middle school messed with my brain chemistry from an early age. I held romantic love on a pedestal, constantly in search of an elusive “soulmate,” and the idea that someone could complete me or fix me became my saving grace. In my childhood, this resulted in comically intense crushes, limerence being a constant state of mind, always infatuated by someone. Looking back, I’m still unsure if I was a hopeless romantic or simply lonely.
Later, as I navigated my first “relationships,” I started to regard love in a different light. High school dating was nothing like the fairytales I had created in my head, and I began to think that maybe love should be more practical than magical. I threw away the idea of a soulmate completely, dumbing it down to a myth or fairytale, something I should grow up and stop believing in like a little kid’s faith in Santa Claus. I refused to let love take control of me in the way it had before, that was embarrassing and behind me now. In fact, I started to think I could outsmart it. Love was the biggest maze and logic was the map, I thought. If I could figure out all the algorithms and mechanisms behind it, it would never catch me by surprise. I would never again be love’s fool. A lot of this sounds like a defense mechanism, and I’m sure a part of it was, but I attribute a lot of it to my personality and how I prioritize thinking above feelings as well . I hated that people “in love” were unable to name exactly what they liked about the person in question. Indignant, I vowed to write down everything I liked about the people I claimed to love, as if I was preparing some premise and argument to reach a conclusion of love. I would scoff at friends who claimed to be “in love” when it was so obvious they were simply attached because of physical affection or the idea of them. I also forbid myself from ever seriously talking about marriage or anything about a “forever” in my relationships, insisting that love is something of its own force with its own will and could only be temporary by nature, that it would only be permanent if someone could prove me wrong.
As my relationships started to get more serious, however, my avoidance of anything permanent started to become a pattern, and the way I was treating each relationship as a philosophical thesis was probably getting annoying to everyone involved. My theories were preventing myself from getting hurt, but I was no happier with love, and there was no conclusion in sight to all my “research.” Worst of all, I was starting to have to admit to myself that deep down, I still longed for a soulmate kind of love.
is the love from your soulmate a warm embrace that only feels right after decades of building walls, each distracted with life? or is it something that appears unassuming at first, insisting for more and more attention until you can’t ignore how its roots have intertwined with yours? is it an all consuming moment, fate’s own personal gamble, something historians can’t shut up about? is it the prize at the end of the tunnel, the secret ingredient not being waited on? something you cultivated yourself, planted, sowed, watered, harvested, with hard work and patience? something to be strictly observed, until there is no feasible flaw, a logic that transcends human intelligence, a perfect circle making its infinite loop? is it a tangled mess, a knotted jumble of chaos and misfortunes? the single gem you find in the midst of that exact clutter, a needle in a haystack, a pearl out of a million oysters? is it innocent, young, something we clutch at right out of the womb? is it old, wise, something we must survive a journey of life for? something shared amongst everyone, something that ties everyone together? is it only given to a select few, those that karma and god have decided deserve it?
There’s an intrinsic difference between being loved as a human and being loved as yourself. Maybe that was what drew me to romantic love specifically; the love your parents and friends have for you somehow transcends who you are, looking past your mistakes and everything ugly, but to me, the core of romantic love has always been being seen. In my romantic relationships, simply being loved as a human was not enough for me, and I hated myself for it. I felt like I was asking for too much, unappreciative and ungrateful, like I was expecting someone to be my soulmate when I was simultaneously telling myself those didn’t exist. I hated when the love I received seemed unconditional, because I always believed that unconditional love was more a positive reflection of its giver than me as the receiver, and it meant it wasn’t unique to me. I wasn’t exactly sure what a love unique to me would feel like, but I knew it would simultaneously transcend any tangible explanation and answer all my burning questions about love. Eventually, I started to feel panicked that maybe this true love didn’t exist, and my anxiety caused me to try and cheat love, shortcutting intimacy, being a little too vulnerable in a desperate attempt to be seen and maybe understood. The understanding I did manage to find was warped and twisted, predictably lacking the trust, warmth and care you nurture in a long-term relationship. Feeling understood without being loved was the loneliest feeling in the world. I wondered if there was something so wrong with me that I could not be both understood and loved. Maybe there was something wrong with everything I was making love to be. Maybe the point to which I had overanalyzed love was almost psychopathic, and it was inaccessible to me now.
And so, I confess that I actually still believe in soulmates to a guy on the fourth or so date in the middle of a crowded subway in the heart of Seoul because what do I have to lose? It’s never going to work out because he goes to school in Boston and I feel slightly bad because I feel like he still really likes me already but too bad, love is not real anyways. I make my Santa Claus metaphor, that it’s more about faith than belief, but at least I know it’s baseless. He tells me soulmates are in fact not real, I say I know, and I ask how he’s so sure about me then. He continues to explain that it’s not about being destined to be with someone, but recognizing when you meet someone that you’re never going to meet again and doing everything in your power to make it work. He tells me he doesn’t know how but he feels that with me and that makes all the effort worth it. And then something clicks.
One of my favorite poems of all time is called “Loving Like An Existentialist” by Savannah Brown. When I first read it, it was a way for me to make peace with no longer believing in soulmates, but it holds a different meaning for me now.
“i wasn’t drawn to you
because our wings are both blue
but because they’re the same colour
as everyone else’s
and you were willing to listen to
why that scared me”
The poem rejects the traditional idea of a soulmate, questioning “wrenching claims of meant-to-be” with the simple response, “I don’t think so.” Brown continues by emphasizing the romance of love that is not bound by prophecy. I think the poem didn’t stick to me the first time I heard it because I didn’t realize how rare and special someone “willing to listen to why that scared me” is. The poem doesn’t suggest that this “existentialist” kind of love is any easier to find than another, just represents it as something underappreciated.
If what I was doing was constructing an algorithm, I had failed to consider a crucial human element. I believe some things about love are within our control, but I do think there’s a certain almost metaphysical aspect of it that cannot ever be quantified that I had forgotten to consider. For me, it was the way my boyfriend had almost immediately recognized not just me, but my soul. I still don’t believe in love at first sight, and I know understanding someone completely takes time, but there was a kind of recognition so indescribable yet tangible I just had to admit, even if he lives a flight away, and I am a broke college student. Even before someone gets the chance to truly understand you, there’s the premonition that they have the potential to, and that is the wonderful part of it all.
Sometimes I wish I met him earlier, to save myself the trouble, but at the end of the day I believe all my ordeals and theories have led to me recognizing him. There’s this otherworldly unshakeable feeling of “you just get it” at our core, but everything else just falls into place: his kindness, his ambition, the utmost care and respect with which he talks about his parents, sisters and friends, and the way I’ve felt like the truest and best version of myself since I’ve met him, all things I’ve learned to notice and appreciate through countless failed theories. (There’s also the feeling that all the vocabulary in the world will not be enough to capture just how much I feel for him, but this will have to do for now.) The ways in which he proves my newest theories right is almost unnecessary because I already know, but he does it anyway. He doesn’t need to prove that he can understand me, but he reads my entire blog unprompted and talks to me about each post. He doesn’t need to prove his certainty or commitment, but he shows up with flowers to every airport greeting anyways. And he proves me wrong, everyday, by loving me and understanding me, unknowingly undoing my every doubt and uncertainty about love.
with every passing day he proves me wrong and right in the best way possible, and everything just makes sense.
As Lana Del Ray sang in in the Margaret, of course, “When you know, you know.” This line rings true to many people because it embraces the abstract nature of true love. Love when I first got to know it felt like something divine to me, the way countless songs were written about it, the things people would do for it despite not being able to define it, and I had forgotten about it somewhere along the way, because breaking it down into more digestible parts seemed safer. The thing that makes it magical is that through generations upon generations of language and culture, it remains undefinable but immediately recognizable. You try and try, write poems, make art, but it escapes your fingertips at the very last second and you accept that. You don’t set out traps for it, or try to memorize its eating and sleeping patterns so you know just when to strike, naively thinking you can catch it to dissect it. You embrace it and thank it for coming.
MiC Columnist Vivian Park can be reached at pvivian@umich.edu
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