A note on love

for Sylvia Tan

You and I are normal girls. That is, girls that present as feminine and, having been raised in Asian households, relatively soft-spoken, which is how the world demand girls be. You and I are normal girls. Between trips to Sephora and mirror selfies and a partiality for pretty flowers, the definition is grafted into our personality, and we become “one of those girls”; the girly girls, the kind of girl the world loves to hate. Girls like you and I spent our teenage years believing that normal is boring—normal is nauseating, even (Pink? The most disgusting colour ever invented. The lovechild of red and white can incapacitate any man, it’s a conspiracy to emasculate the world!), and we try with all our might to distance ourselves from our sex, and we found being “one of the guys” totally brag-worthy. But pigmented eyeshadows are incredibly satisfying to swatch, and if you lean against the wall a certain way that dressing room selfie make your legs look longer than they actually are, and some flowers bloom in your heart and in your first inhale you think that this must be what love smells like, and you feel lucky that you are allowed to like all these things because you are, for all intents and purposes, a normal girl. Then girls like you and I find each other and we agree that we wouldn’t have it any other way, that we feel sorry for anyone who would refute such gratifying experiences, and all those hate we have internalised were silenced by our screams over a Taylor Swift song. I don’t care, You Belong With Me is an anthem. Fight me.

You and I are normal girls, which means we grew up on romance and raised on the promise that this is what we were made for. We were given vivid images of what love looks like: a broody, impeccably dressed Mr. Darcy pacing in front of an idyllic English cottage, a perfect crossover of dark academia and cottagecore aesthetic; a sweet, awkward Hugh Grant with his impossibly soft hair, his hands on his hip and his round glasses perched on his nose, listening to you in a snug bookstore that no doubt smells like old parchment and freshly-baked sourdough; or Mark Ruffalo, the gold standard of the leading man in a friends-to-lovers arc, playing coy with his crooked smile while he takes candid photos of you laughing over something he said. Girls like us were led to believe that any of these men might hate you a little, but that’s how you know they actually like you. They pull your pigtails just to get your attention, they say, but girls like you and I grow up and we realise that the closest we can get to an English cottage is a remodeled condo, and Mr. Darcy would wear basketball jerseys to literally any event that doesn’t say “black tie”. We realise that Hugh Grant wears the wrong kind of glasses and are those boat shoes? and Mark Ruffalo, bless his heart, is on his phone climbing the ranks on Mobile Legends. Girls like you and I dream of a specific kind of love. It comes in detailed scenes of romantic gestures, the kind we know only happen in movies, the kind we still secretly want anyway. But we grow up, we grow up, and the dream is shattered. Mr. Darcy takes on another name, and Hugh Grant breaks your heart from time to time, and Mark Ruffalo is so infuriating you swear one of these days you won’t allow him on the bed. Yet we call it love, still—the kind that doesn’t disappear when the credits roll.

The best thing about being girls like you and I is that we learn to dream of other things. We learn that so much of the promises made to us will betray us. Our character, pure and tender as they make us believe, they will use to vilify and discredit us. Our potential to love, great as it is, they will reduce to servitude. And when they pull our pigtails, we learn, it is not in jest, and they might not stop until the hair is torn from our scalp. These are not joyful lessons, and we learn it the way we wake from a nightmare: abruptly, its effects dizzying and leaving us gasping for air. But maybe that’s how it needs to be. Some lessons take their time. Some of our delusions are benign; nothing more than white lies we maintain for self-preservation, and in good time they go away, like layers of mist being peeled off one at a time. But some delusions are so ingrained it’s as durable as a bulletproof screen. The only way it will break is by detonation, and to delay it is a certain path to self-destruction. So we look elsewhere. We study and work and read and discover that love is not anything the world has made it out to be. It cannot be personified by any broody character or expressed in fullness through any wifely duties, and it surely cannot be contained in casual cruelty. Love does not confine. But girls like you and I know that it might never set you free, either—it has enough power to deceive and trap you, like it has done our mothers and many women before us. But love is inescapable.

Girls like you and I will call love by many names, but we know they are only temporary and though they don’t disappear with the credits, they fade, slowly but surely, no matter how tightly we hold on to them. This sounds rather sad, I realise, but you and I are well-acquainted with denouement; we find it comforting to know that some stories end for others to begin. But there is a kind of love that lasts, you see. “Love yourself” is now a kind of cliche, and I personally detest it: It requires conscious effort to do, and it imagines love as a special bar of soap you can lather all over your body on the weekends. The kind of love that lasts is the kind within you; the kind you take for granted and the kind you don’t see most days. It’s the prickle on your fingertips when you see a full bouquet of red roses. The warmth that swims over your chest when you see a puppy. It’s the heat behind your eyes when you see your mother cry, and the jolt of ecstasy in your spine when the winning goal has been shot on that really important game. It’s the lump in your throat when you think of marriage, the swirling in your stomach while you wait to go in for that interview, the bend of your shoulders when you embrace a companion on a fine morning, and the white of your knuckles when you grip the hand laying on the hospital bed. It’s love, you see, in glorious light and alarming darkness. But as Jeanette Winterson writes: Not all dark places need light—I have to remember that.