First: Know your audience.
The room will be filled with a variety of souls, each with their own particular brand of bias. You’ll want to be intimately familiar with each if you’ve got a prayer of reaching them.
You’ve got the die-hard romantics who will go to their grave desperately clutching their belief in the singular power of romantic love to their fluttering chests. You’ll know them by their flowing white dresses and the fairy crown of flowers they like to wear in their hair.
You’ll get plenty of brutal cynics, wrapping their last remaining tiny kernel of hope in a weighted blanket of gloomy pessimism and impossibility, shouting their naysaying from the back corner. They may throw rotten tomatoes at you in an attempt to throw you off but they never miss the show. Be prepared.
You’ve got the happily-ever-afters who married their high school sweethearts and had three perfect children who come home for every holiday in the front row and the happily-never-afters who have been miserable for 35 years now but will never quite get up the courage to leave slinking around the back of the room. Sometimes they like to share their popcorn with each other.
There’s a rowdy section that includes the dog-eared supermarket bodice ripper romance novel addicts and the perpetually single bad bitches who can’t be bothered to smooth the rough off their edges for anyone. Somehow they always end up sitting next to each other but nobody really understands why. Maybe it’s because they both tend to own a lot of cats.
Please note:
A. Every single one of them is hoping that you’re finally the person who will tell them a story they can believe in.
B. One of these, but usually more, will take the form of the person you love the most. They will be listening harder than the rest to see what kinda stuff your story is made of.
No pressure.
Second: Understand the rules of war
Gather your generals. You’ll find them behind the doors marked Hope and Trauma and Grief and Other Vaguely Impossible Daydreams. There is also one sitting in the center of a hidden room that holds the VHS tapes of every single 90’s rom-com ever made. She looks like the forgotten ghost of your 13-year-old self, all acne and braces and a wild sort of belief in the whole wide world. Don’t forget to find her. She’s very important to the success of your mission because some days she will be the only one who still believes you can win.
Spread out your maps in the war room. You’ve got to locate the exact space between the instigating event and the battlefield, between the artillery fire the white flag surrender, and the eleventh-hour peace treaty negotiations. Between the celebration in the streets where the soldiers kiss random women and confetti rains down from above and the aftermath of all the fighting and the parades when life returns to a quieter form of living.
This task is complicated by the fact that this spot is not stationary or singular. It is infinite and ever-shifting and impossible to pin down for more than a moment.
It’s a ridiculous fuckery of a job, but don't give up. You only need a moment. The x you mark on that spot is the space where all the real words about love are buried.
Be ready to dig deep.
Third: Get out a dictionary and a good thesaurus.
Search for every last word and definition that exists in the infinite liminality between the sweet innocence of hope and the hard edge of existential despair.
You’ll need your wits about you to find the language that can traverse the terrain between the purity of one whose heart is gleaming and intact and beating in perfect unison with a kind and gentle universe, but without losing touch with the unflinchingly brutal grief of one who has had to pick her own bleeding heart up off the kitchen floor and tuck it back into her chest all pulpy and oozing more times than she can count.
You’ll also need to find every phrase that exists in every language on earth that has ever been for the sweet potential that exists in every perfect beginning and for the final moment of closing a door to a room that holds everything you thought you ever wanted but somehow could not hold. And for every moment in between. Naturally.
Oh, and please don’t forget the complete lexicon for every moment that exists in the undefinable interim between yes and no. Between now and never. Between bliss and break. Between desire and despair. Between first arrival and final irrevocable exit.
Between the heat of two magnet bodies that cannot stay apart and the chasm of distance between lovers who cannot find their way to common ground.
Even more challenging though will be sleuthing out the spaces between the words and beyond the words. The worldless weight of the anticipation of the first kiss. Of the silent second right before the unkind word is uttered. Of the subtle shift between rose-colored glasses to a lens of a different kind. Of the shape of the mouth just before it says the very last goodbye. Of the way two bodies puzzle piece together in a full suspension of every last disbelief.
Yes, this list will be comprised of an awful lot of words. Every true love story is.
Fourth: You’re going to have to get raw.
You must sharpen the razor’s edge understanding of what you know to be the truth. You must flatten your ego and kill your pride. You must demolish your innate tendency to sweeten the delivery of poison or soften the blow.
You’re going to have to line your demons and your triggers and the wild amount of bullshit you’ve been carrying around up against the wall and ready them for a firing line of language they can’t possibly come through without a new scar or two.
While you’re at it you’ll need to shed any remaining shackles of shame. You’ll need to get down and dirty with the raunchiest, kinkiest, wildest parts of you and invite them to sunbathe naked while the neighbors are watching. Ditto your aching and your neediest inner child and every inner tantrum you’ve ever held back. Please don’t leave out your passive-aggressive tendencies or your childhood attachment wounds, inconvenient as they are, we’re going to need them too.
But while you’re excavating, please invite the little one who dreamed of the perfect white wedding on a cliff by the seaside and the one who asked the ouija board to please tell her the name of her true love when she still believed such things were possible. Also every bottle you ever spun hoping for a kiss and the cumulative timeline of every last seven-minute span you ever spent in any sort of heaven.
Make space at the table for every time you’ve chosen repair over continued rupture. Every patient moment of care and compassion. Every kindness. Every outreach into hope. Every last kiss that weakened your knees. Every moment you turned toward love when everything in you wanted to run away. Every last long game you’ve ever wanted to play in the name of a singular perfect maybe.
It’s easy to imagine that in order to be true, a story needs to be hard, but I want you to remember that love is always - in the end - about the sliver of space where the softest parts of you meet the harder lines and it all blurs together into an undefinable something more.
It’s that dance that breathes life into your story. And that’s the air we’ve all been craving.
Fifth: If steps one through four seem a little intense, perhaps you could just do this:
Follow the compass that leads you back to the one that you love.
Lay down on your bed next to your lover.
Place your hand on their heart and their hand on yours.
Take three deep breaths in unison and feel the cadence of your pulse fall into sync.
Look into their eyes and don’t say a word.
Try for a moment to see what happens if you just simply believe that it all holds purpose.
That the love of you have lived has been an act in service of something greater than you know.
That every word you speak to one another is the most honest love story you’ll ever write.
Trust that entirety of your story exists right there.
Always has. Always will.
Every single time.
Tell me your favorite love stories in the comments. What makes a good love story to you?
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