In defense of (crazy) love

When love chooses you, you’re limp in its arms. Let’s say that he was your classmate. You had every class together. He sat beside you. Sometimes the right side, sometimes the left. You exchanged pens, thoughts, numbers. You sipped each other’s coffees. His was milky, yours was sweet. Class became an exercise in grappling with his energy. It’s not that you intentionally tuned out the teacher; it’s that her vocal frequencies couldn’t contend with the static between you and your classmate. You found ways to write about him in your homework assignments. Your homework suffered as a result. Everything suffered as a result. Everything but him, and he was everything.

You fell in love the way Russians do. You surrendered to a Regime of Fate. You tried to unearth a rational, self-advancing agency in the matter, but this love was a train of the sort you see in great fiction, or in the final Back to the Future movie. Your first fight introduced you to internal mechanisms that had never previously been broken, and to bits and pieces that had never previously been torn apart. But who are your friends to say that love shouldn’t run you over or send you soaring off a cliff? This isn’t some romantic ideal you decided to realize as a girl because you read one too many novels. This isn’t the kind of love you’d request if a spectrum of options from Ned & Maude to Sid & Nancy was laid out before you. But this is what’s happening. You really are tied to the tracks. Life takes you places.

The drama tends to tip the scales. You’ve been happier than you ever thought possible. But you’ve also been debased. You’ve been undone. You’ve been fucking miserable. At those times the answers should be clear, but they’re not. You’ve questioned yourself into the occasional nervous breakdown. You emerge bigger, better, your heart more open with grace and forgiveness. You do it all over again. Or rather, you do it to him, he does it to you. You inflict pain and joy on each other. Which doesn’t seem to be allowed in this day and age. You wonder why you can’t be a feminist and completely batshit boy crazy at the same time.

What feels bad: trying to make sense of it. Trying to define it once and for all. Trying to match your childhood to his as if the wounds would disappear if you could only reconcile on the playground. Something rubs you the wrong way about the standards to which modern American relationships are held. You read up on this stuff trying to rationalize what isn’t rational and perfect what isn’t perfectible. You consume literature devoted to categorizing partners and partnerships. You try to reduce the deeply personal to affairs of black and white. You subscribe to healthy/unhealthy dichotomies that make you feel ashamed and sick and stupid. You read too many self-improvement articles that treat your partner more as a gadget for your own growth than as a complex individual. Vast portions of the population are dismissed as toxic. You wonder what happens to all those people who the gurus say don’t deserve to be loved.

The dominant storylines aren’t true for you anymore. You’re no one’s languishing victim. You aren’t weak for occasionally trusting in forces that exist beyond your human frailty. You aren’t weak for being kind. You aren’t weak for conceding to metaphysics. You aren’t diminished by your vulnerability. Honoring difference does not equate to self-sacrifice. Love is not “womanly” or submissive or something to be ashamed of. Love is a beast. Love makes you a fighter.

What feels good: loving, having faith, working through it, staying loyal, staying strong, asking for help when you need it. You stick to that.

You’re aware of how naïve you sound when someone says “leave” and you counter with “love.” But you have studied every inch of both alternatives. The love is not what you would choose, but you respect the forces, and you remain.

You shouldn’t have blown off your homework assignments. You know better now. You shouldn’t have failed to thrive just because you became two instead of one. You know better now. You regret your self-neglect. You regret feeling compassion for him and not for yourself. You know better now. You apologize to your teachers for a year of not listening. And you forgive yourself for past mistakes. Because love does not crush you in this narrative. Love calibrates you to be a person who connects, and to whom one can be connected. And that, dear boys and girls, is everything.

One Thought on “In defense of (crazy) love

  1. I like this Jeannette Winterson quote from a talk between her and Marlon James:

    “Maybe our western culture just doesn’t help people deal with their feelings. It’s complicated, loving someone is hard. Staying the course with someone is hard. You can’t just keep upgrading people like you do with your phone.”

    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/28/conversation-jeanette-winterson-marlon-james-interview

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