The Risk Of Writing About Love In Real-Time
If I’m going to shatter, I’ll find my breaking in the loving ...
“To love another is something
like prayer and it can’t be planned,
you just fall into its arms
because your belief undoes your disbelief.”
~ Anne Sexton, from “Admonitions To A Special Person”Dearheart,
I told you recently that I was in love.
And it’s true, I AM in love.
(holy sweet fuck, it’s always a giddy sort of miracle to find ourselves in love, isn’t it?)
But it turns out that writing about love in real-time is a tender and delicate thing.
As it happens—through all these years—I’ve mostly written my love stories in retrospect.
I’ve written plenty from the distance of the not-so-happily-ever-after…
I’ve written with more than a small dose of the sort of rose-colored-glass-wearing-they-were-the-love-of-my-life-and-now-i’ll-be-alone-forever romanticized filter one leans on when dealing with an ending they never wanted and tried not to see coming.
I’ve indulged in my share of its contemptuous counterpart the god-every-last-moment-was-awful-my-ex-is-the-demon-spawn-of-satan lens we can sometimes briefly use to bravado our aching hearts into some version of it-was-absolutely-totally-completely-their-loss-and-fuck-it-all-to-hell-i-am-better-off-without-them.
I’ve written reams of heartfelt poetry. Straight from my tears to the computer screen stream of consciousness ramblings. Tens of thousands of texted diatribes to my besties detailing the minutiae of what it is to love and hope and grieve and somehow harness the bravery (and the seemingly foolhardy optimism) to do it all over again.
I’ve sent carefully crafted essays out into the ethers of the internet, trusting my words would land in the waiting arms and eyes and hearts of readers I will likely never know or see or speak to. Just so that we’d all know we weren’t so entirely alone in the 3 am prayers or the wild demolition of all those dreams.
Either way, I’ve written mostly from the viewpoint of the ghosts that visit us in the after, when love has left the building and we are convinced it may never come back again.
Oh sure, I’ve scrawled plenty in my journals in the midst of the fall-in and the fall-out, and the patched-together muddy middles that comprise the in-between of this crazy little thing called love.
I’ve penned falling head over feet love letters with fountain pens on textured watercolor paper, like some chaste Victorian heroine.
I’ve dashed off hot as fuck sex poems and explicit sonnets to the objects of my longing for the heat of their kiss/taste/touch/release.
I’ve certainly authored multiple long laments of angst and woe, all gnashing grief and grasping hands and knees on the ground pleading to gods I don’t even think I believe in.
I’ve written entirely epic-to-nobody but me self-indulgent love sagas that will NEVER see the light of day.
But rarely have I shared these stories with you while I was living them.
In truth, I’ve shared very little of the love that I have lived, in the before, or in the during, or even in the after.
So for all my bravery and vulnerability with the written word, why haven’t I written much about my lived experience of loving?
A wish for privacy, some sort of separation between personal self and public persona?
Yes, of course.
Are some things too sacred to offer to the wide and waiting world, deserving to be held closely, and with infinite tenderness?
Mother-fucking-absolutely.
Have I found myself with an inability to find language for the sort of aliveness and desperate need found in the most intimate of spaces?
Without a doubt.
Have I long known of my own attachment to a pattern of only writing from the wound?
Who me? (uh, yes me).
Do I hold onto a lingering paranoia and knock-wood superstition that talking about a good thing might make the good thing go away, poof—all black magic vanishing act?
But of course.
Whatever the reason, if you look at my body of work you’ll find more on the painful aftermath of love lost or the desperate longing of love hoped-for than you will about the specifics and glories of love lived.
And oh, my darlings, I am doing us all disservice if I don’t speak and write about how deeply well I have been loved in this life, and of the good, good loving I have given along the way.
And by loving I mean the work of my steadily beating heart yes, of course. But also of my body, and my spirit, and my soul. I mean loved for a matter of hours or loved for years or loved without ever even knowing the beauty of my breath mingling with theirs—because some love doesn’t require presence to change your damn life.
Love, I have found, isn’t so interested in our limitations and containers and rules. Nor does it care much for our frantic bargains for our own safety. It says a giant fuck you to our attempts to plan. It definitely has little use for our desperation to keep things tidy and predictable so we don’t chance losing our hearts to what was never meant to be a risk-free operation.
“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.” ~ Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions
Love’s imperative lies in giving ourselves over to its living totality for as long as it lasts and is ours to know.
And yes, for all of the tiny infinities I have given myself over to in this life, I have been blessed and broken and blessed again a million times over.
Maybe that is why, when I write of love, I write with pragmatism and a reality that acknowledges the ache and the break and the undoing, but also with a dogged optimism that recognizes that I can’t think of a single reason for us to exist except to show up for love with everything we’ve got.
Honestly and truly, I can’t think of a single reason for any of us to exist if it’s not to show up for love with everything we’ve got.
“There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.” ~ Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
This is why, even in the ache, I write with a holy sort of gratitude for the ways that love has moved and changed and met me along this journey.
It’s true, love leaves us with ten questions for every single answer it provides.
What do I know of love?
What do I want from love?
What do I offer to love?
What will love teach me next?
Can I open wide enough and heal deep enough to become what love requires?
What will I lose if I give myself over to this loving? What might I gain?
Will it last, will it last, will it last?
Will I survive this love? Will this love survive me?
These questions swirl and dance inside me right now, because yes, my dearest reader, I am so entirely in love.
To compare one love to the next (or the last or the first or the imaginary specter of what might come) is natural, of course.
To mark the differences with hope and anticipation. To note the similarities with trepidation. To catalog the unknowns with some wild combination of holy-shit-wtf-am-i-doing fear and the sparkle of giddy-pinch–me-i’m-actually-doing-this potential that keeps us stepping into the fall, despite the possibility of loss inherent each and every time we unwrap our heart and offer it to another.
We do this and we can’t help it and we shouldn’t blame ourselves. But one thing I have come to know is that each love we will ever know in this life belongs solely to itself.
Just as we, in the end, belong solely to ourselves.
Each love story is entirely its own. It comes with its own energy, its own trajectory, and its own lessons to teach.
So yes, like all love stories, this one is entirely different from every love that has come before.
Different and deep and whole and holy. Safe and complex and contradictory. Scary and wobbly and uncertain. Honest and mysterious and true. Like exploring uncharted terrain and still somehow like coming home. Filled with grief and joy and triggers and healing and jesus-fuck-theres-a-lot-of-work-to-do-here-on-this-battle-scared-heart. Terrifying and brilliant and sweet and full of the kind of primal desire that leaves me utterly undone.
I want to start writing from the center of love. Not only from the edges and endings, but also from the beautiful and messy interior, in real-time.
Because it would be a damn shame to not record what a god damn victory of the human heart is that she and I ended up in the same space at the same time. That we somehow managed to recognize each other. That we spoke bravely and leaned in and said yes, and yes, and yes again.
Despite every last loss and doubt and fear that could have taken us out; we locked eyes and decided (a thousand times already in just a handful of months) to keep playing the long game, to keep choosing, to keep showing up for the ride.
I want you. And this. And us.
I choose you. And this. And us.
That’s what we say to each other, she and I, to mark the significance of this continual opt-ing in that we’re doing.
“I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.” ~Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
To continue reading the full post (and learn all about the love story I am living and the woman who has my heart), become a paid subscriber of my work in the world below…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Permission; Granted to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.