BEHIND THE SCENES: Love stories are often true, but rarely whole.
Welcome to the deeper story behind my public posts.
Behind The Scenes will take a deeper look into the stories behind the permission slips and pep talks and 2200-character Instagram words of wisdom. An attempt to grow as a writer, and as a human, by pushing into new my own creative edges.
I am aware that I get awarded bravery points for vulnerability often, without truly exposing myself in a way that comes with any sort of risk or extension into new territory.
I am ready to reach farther.
Following this introduction, my Behind The Scenes essays will be available to paying subscribers only, in thanks for the profound gift and trust you’ve given me by naming my work important enough to you to offer your financial support.
This is also a way of choosing a smaller circle to begin sharing within. The fact that you’ve chosen to invest in my work and offerings to the world is not taken for granted, and it helps me to feel safer reaching beyond my own comfort level.
Thank you, for being here, and for helping to create an ongoing financial foundation for my work in the world.
Behind the Scenes: Volume One
Love stories are often true, but rarely whole.
I recently wrote a love poem for my partner on the anniversary of the texted confession of her crush on me (and my realization that I hadn’t been pining into the void of unrequited love after all, thank the ever-loving fuck).
The response was more than I could have imagined. It filled me, heart and soul, to see our love so recognized, celebrated, and held so tenderly.
But then I considered, watching the comments come in on that poem, that someone might read it and imagine that I’ve now gotten this love thing all wrapped up in a neat little bow, orderly and beautiful and inspiring.
That same someone might then feel less than, or feel a deep well of longing rise up in their belly, or imagine that this love poem reflected a relational perfection that they can’t even conceive could ever come their way.
I couldn’t quite escape the feeling that this would be a disservice, not just to my readers, but to the complex love story I have been living.
And so I followed that up with an essay that fell a bit outside my norm - one called How To Write An Honest Love Story.
Writing that last piece was a creative and emotional reaction to this nagging frustration in me that the poem, while a sacred and honest offering, didn’t quite speak into the fullness of truth. I needed to write it and felt satisfied creatively, scratching an itch that had been waiting to be scratched.
But it still didn’t get to the root of the story.
I often tangle with my responsibility here. As a writer. As a lover. As a human.
In this age of social media and performative sharing (primed as we are to highlight reel the hell out of our lives), it’s hard to write a really true story about much of anything.
But it feels extra hard to write a true story about love.
Actually, let me clarify:
Writing a true story about love isn't that tricky, if truth is merely an in-integrity glimpse. A finite window into a partial chapter that doesn’t attempt to ever become an entire book. A verifiable record of emotions or facts or details about a specific slice of a relationship.
If we adopt this definition then, yes. I have written many a true story about love.
But if there is one thing I have come to know about writing after 20+ years of spilling my life onto the page it is this:
A story can be true without being whole.
Confession: I have written a fair number of stories that contain a hell of a lot of holes (loopholes, sinkholes, holes in comprehension, gaping chasms lacking in self-awareness, integrity, or transparency).
Out of necessity.
Out of sovereign choice.
Out of respect for the other players in the story.
But also out of avoidance of knowing what I knew. Out of fear or anxiety or worry about repercussions. Out of an unwillingness to hold up a mirror and show you the full reflection. Out of a fear that if you truly saw the mess of my reality, you might not look at me quite the same.
The call to write a story about love that is whole—that reflects the truth in its entirety and speaks what is without flinching—while still holding sacred and private what is meant to remain inside the container of the relationship?
Well, that’s a doozy of a request right there.
Writing a whole love story does not:
Pretty up the ugly or the mundane
Brush over the rough patches to avoid discomfort
Erase the good in the name of validating what is bad
School girl gush the infatuation from the shallows without reflecting the nuance of the depths
Wallow in the pit of its own heartbroken misery.
Expose private or tender details for the sake of clicks or shock or retribution or validation.
And figuring how to do all of that, my dear readers, is hard as fuck.
(Take into account, if you will, that when one writes her life for public consumption, the stories that she writes about love are not just read by strangers - they may also be read by her children, her mother. and her lovers themselves. Oy).
The pressure can feel awfully high to get it “right”, even when I know damn well there is no “right” to be gotten.
The rules of engagement in this filter-the-hell-out-of-our-lives-world say that there are two acceptable stories to tell about romantic love.
The story that everything is brilliant, beautiful, never been better, happily ever after amen.
The story that it has ended, leaving us stoically broken-hearted but soldiering bravely on.
How about the raw guts of everything in between the polarity of those tropes?
All the ways that two (or more) humans can move with the best of intentions and still royally fuck things up.
The long nights of spirling and processing and endless tears, followed by the most healing passionate lovemaking.
The almost-breakups-that-never-quite-land because damn it all to hell you still have some fight left in you.
The quiet moments of cuddling on the couch while watching trash tv.
The anxious and the avoidant and all the messy liminality.
The way healing can feel like a brutal dismantling and hope and despair can live in the space between two bodies.
The quiet sweetness of finishing sentences and knowing their coffee order and all the shorthand that develops over time.
The rolling over in your sleep to reach out a hand or a foot for just a sliver of connection and feeling your lover stir just enough to reach back.
How early magic gives way to long-term mundanity, which can be its own sort of magic.
The grief in the ways we stop seeing each other, the unkind lenses that can cloud our vision, and the pure, unadulterated wonder when the clouds part and the sun shines and there they are again, this human you love and you are dumbstruck by the wonder of it all.
If you have loved, and I know that you have, I’m sure you know all of these stories and so many more.
So, what does this mean for me as a writer?
I know I’ve been guilty of writing only around the edges of my love stories, avoiding the rich challenge of the middles, even though this time around I promised I would attempt to write my love in real-time.
Turns out that’s harder than even I knew.
And so, circling back to the beginning of this essay (far longer than I imagined it would be) I recently wrote a truly honest and beautiful love poem.
Every word of it (both the public version and the far more intimate private version shared only with my love) was true. To the depths of my soul true. To the depths of our connection true. To the depths of my hopes and dreams for what may be in our future true.
But no, it wasn’t whole.
To tell the wholeness of love in a single love poem or essay is a gargantuan feat. Perhaps impossible.
There is a reason that Tolstoy’s great love story, Anna Karenina, is 364,000 words long.
But of course, Anna Karenina is not a book that tells an airbrushed story to propagate the cultural mythology of love-conquers-all. Instead, Tolstoy rips that mythology apart at the seams to tell a complex story of love, desire, betrayal, heartbreak, and loss.
The truth, as we all know it—hopeless romantics and die-hard cynics alike (no matter how large the gap between how loath the former and how proud the latter may be to admit it)—is that love most certainly does not conquer all.
Love is the barest foundation of a whole and true story. The easiest part. The simplest ingredient to source.
But as much as love can and should include a whole lot of goodness and ease, whole and true love stories do not usually fit inside a box marked simple and easy, because humans are rarely simple or easy.
If you consider what Anna Karenina holds (not just one story, but a multitude of distinct and intersecting stories, true of all love stories, when you get right down to it) it seems entirely reasonable that 900ish page tome was probably the short version of what it took Tolstoy to tell a whole story of love.
So, how does one online writer attempt to do it in an Instagram post?
How do I do what I am here to do—which is to tell you the truth of this life as honestly and completely as I can—without falling into the trap of sharing only from the acceptable edges (all the while honoring the privacy of those I’ve been handed the privilege of loving)?
I have been loved, and loved well, in this life. Loves that have lifted and sustained me and even years later remind me of my power and beauty and worth.
I have been broken and left for dead on the side of the road, heart spilling out onto the pavement.
And I have lived every infinity in between.
I know that you have too.
Every single love story I have ever known holds all of those infinities. Including the one I am living now.
Which of course, makes it really hard to consider myself up to the task of telling a whole, honest love story in the span of a 2200-character Instagram post, or a 2500-word essay.
I’d need hours of your time. Books worth of words. A level of vulnerability and raw honesty that even I find hard to source.
But I still want to try, somehow.
Because when you bunch and tuck and weave all the disparate pieces of my body of work on the subject of love into some sort of mishmashed collection—I want them to reflect an image of love that is both whole and holy.
That is raw and ugly and beautiful and true.
That doesn’t shy away from the rough edges but also invites you right into the sticky swirling center.
That tells a tale of heat and passion and divide and disconnect and how they sometimes live so much closer than you might imagine.
That speaks to the heart of what it is to bare your soul to another. To want with everything you are to be seen, chosen, safe.
To know that nobody can promise us that, not even truly ourselves, but to keep on wanting and reaching for it anyway on the off chance that someday, someone comes close.
If I were to attempt to tell you a whole story, I would say this:
I am living in the heart of a love story that is beautiful, this is true. It is also hard. Deep healing has been sourced and real harm has been done. We fumble and fail and grapple and trip over each other, words and hearts and actions trying hard to get it right and sometimes fucking it all up anyway.
It’s one of the certain things I have ever known, and I’m also not always entirely sure where we go from here.
And none of that makes this love any less beautiful.
My love and I are deep in the process of loving, which is too big (too complicated, too beautiful, too painful, too confusing, too private, too everything) of a story to ever be told in one go.
As I attempt to write about this in a way that honors it well, I’ve got approximately zero chance of getting it perfect. But god damn it, this love deserves a holy (and whole) sort of honoring.
All love does.
And I think, perhaps, if I keep trying - maybe I’ll eventually get closer to the truth of our wholeness. In a way that honors the relentless kind of bravery it has taken us to show up for love.
To write a love story that is both true and whole requires that we acknowledge one unavoidable truth:
To attempt to reduce the complexity of our human experience of love to a singular story, at best, an act of unlikely magic, and at worst, perhaps, proof of an adorably naive sort of madness.
This may be my biggest challenge as a writer (or as a human, for that matter).
To take the solidity and uncertainty of language and to try to twist, cajole and weave my limited emotional vocabulary into something that lives and breathes on the page or screen, landing even remotely close to being capable of holding the entirety of my love story.
To be willing to dance into the space of vulnerability and risk - over and over again. To reach for the edges without losing the center.
To know I won’t ever get it exactly right (the writing, or the loving), but that if I keep trying - I may one day live to tell you a story you can rest your entire being inside.
A story in which you can recognize the threads of your own homecoming.
A story that comes somewhere close to being whole.
Yes, I have been living an epic love.
And that love deserves an epic love story.
One that is honest.
Holy.
True.
Whole.
For now, I’m just going to try to do my best to write it.
I just created a new section of this journal called ON LOVE - a designated place for me to tuck the body of work I share here on that most tumultuous and tender of topics.
The falling and the losing.
The embrace and the retreat.
The endless pleasure and the going, going, gone.
ON LOVE will be a space to invite a deeper leaning into writing the truth of my heart, my relationships, and my journey with queerness and non-monogamy, past, present and future.
This means I’m going to have to take a closer look at why and how I’m telling those stories.
Please join me.
If this post has resonated with you, or there is someone in your life who needs to read a more honest story about love, please share.