My heart is racing and no, it’s not because I’ve run a marathon, although I am running a mile of sorts, taking yet another chance on love. I grip my purse, my fingers subconsciously clawing into the leather of my purse. My lips are painted a perky and poppy shade of red. My black turtleneck makes me resemble a fierce Audrey Hepburn, hugging my curves in all the pleasing, yet appropriate, places. My tortoiseshell earrings dangle, themselves tiny artistic trinkets amidst the brunette of my tresses. Overall I feel confident, yet a bit of fear creeps in, just enough to keep the excitement active, a formidable and palpable anticipation. The restaurant is loud, bustling with snapshots of other lives; the smell of seared meat and butter wafting from the kitchen, the sound of wine glasses clinking, and also the subtle scent of perfume lingering, overwhelming my senses. He walks in, and suddenly I look up. He’s so much more striking in person. He was perfect in the way that all men were as if roughly carved from a block of handsome wood; he was rough and ready in all the right places and ways, with subtle incongruencies of the environmentally-sustained kind. I laugh, and he smiles, a conversation and hope striking up in equal measure. As the night ends, he looks a little too long into my eyes. Finally, it seems, my purveying of passion had come to fruition. I know that I shouldn’t feel such a pull, half mischievous and half longing, to want to kiss him. Yet, before I can make my move, he pulls away. We say goodnight and I feel as if I am floating ten feet above the sky, unable to touch the earth, only able to touch my heart. Two months later after that night, I’m on the ground. It’s happened again. My hands are shaking. My heart is pounding. Tears stain my face like red wine that stains a white shirt, unable to be left unnoticed—a failed mission. A desire to be loved becomes a reality of longing and loneliness. My heart is a battered Tupperware container; an object meant to hold, but who feels its emptiness amplified until it no longer feels that it can hold much of anything. I think of how I got here— face red, heart numb, an aching soul, belief and hope abused, on my bedroom floor, in my own unhinged state of Olivia Rodrigo-ness.
In my obsession to be loved, I forgot to consider how many ways my desire to be loved could be fulfilled. I became fixated on romance. For so long I believed that the most fulfilling and meaningful way to be loved was by being adored in a gendered dynamic relationship. If I had the affections of a man, I was a woman, and I was loved. To be loved by a man was to be called into being as one who was loved, a successful venture and validation. Many instances concerning my rigid definition of love had, historically, led me down paths in which my desire drew me into dynamics where I was both the loved and the lover, playing both parts with the enthusiasm of my love-hungry heart. It was a perfect plan, to find a man, as it had often seemed to me, to love within a relationship segregated by gender, exemplified my worthiness to be loved, and that more importantly, I could be loved.Â
For so long, my universe was a rotation of scoundrels, a carousel of ingenious imposters and liege lords of lying. While I searched for something real, all I found were authentic liars, indisputably real in their falsity, and masterfully deliberate in their deception. As I waited to fill the void that I had not yet learned to sit with, I had a smattering of dismal dates. They were meager attempts for the least meager of loves-kisses with egregiously exaggerating Denver architects, lukewarm guacamole, and grease-soaked tacos shared over lackluster conversation with a self-professed asian Zac Effron, and pretentious discussions of Latin American literature accompanied by a surprisingly grandfather-esque sweater vest and divine lemon oil cake. Chock-full of content these scenarios were, although not for the better. I wore my heart on my sleeve like they wove their lies out of thin air. I wanted to be loved, so naively but albeit passionately, I was convinced. My heart was reinforced, observing around me, feeding off the fear I saw in the flourishing of love around me, a comparison comforted by confirmation bias, scared that I would never be loved. Instead, love always seemed to be around the corner, playing hide and seek, something I saw that was in incomparable nearness to me, but something, nonetheless, that always managed to stay one step ahead of me.Â
Yet, through it all, I’ve begun to discern the diversity of love and the endless possibilities to love and be loved. I’m trading in my rigid notions of what it means to be loved, expanding from men to a multiplicity. As much time as I’ve spent chasing after men in an obsessive attempt to be loved, I’ve realized that my reliance upon romantic attention from the opposite gender is only a high to get by, a patching over with love’s duct tape to stop the leak of my heart and terminate the possibility of my heart’s fullness finally being empty. I’ve wanted love because I feel that it will add something to myself, acting as an incomparable richness intrinsic to a complete heart. I’ve pursued an exclusively antiquated type of love by building away and patching up the whole inside of myself. It wasn’t love I was experiencing— it was a denial of a pained self, of a hurting heart, desperate for self-attention rather than masculine gratification. Instead of feeling more complete, like I dreamed that love from another would bring, I felt more empty and removed of substance, more than of one who gained anything precious at all. Relationships made me feel insecure, naked, removed of both clothing and any distance at all, yet they were a type of dramatic inconsistency I obsessively held onto as gratification. Sex created distance and confusion, a sensual moment but a barricade meant to last through longevity, my emotions just as tangled as my body in the sheets. Love from another was a plus and minus equation; the negative and positive often canceled each other out, adding to nothing. The only weight I felt was a sense of gravitas in the nothingness that I felt inside, willing something to change.Â
To be most loved, I’ve realized, is not to search for it elsewhere in a rigid romance, but rather to explore the endless love within loving myself. I’ve learned that I’m the controller of my own destiny. I’m the controller of how I treat myself. No longer must I sit and pass off lackluster efforts and manipulations as a nonlinear love. Instead, having myself be the one who loves me most shows me the power of eliminating the fear of not finding someone, for the comfort of a sustained love.Â
Men may come and go, but I, myself, am forever. Relationships, basing one’s attainment of love on adorations from another, always made me associate love with fragility, instability and inconsistency. Love was, for the longest time, so ethereal; it flitted and floated high above me, small, unable to grasp, laughing at me in its escape— an emotional Tinker Bell. Yet, in loving myself, I began to heal the reflex in myself that associated love with a chase, drama, and the sinking sensation within. Furthermore, loving myself is a longevous pursuit.I am always here, while others may not be, and thus a love that is for myself far outlasts a love that is for another, whose presence isn’t a promise. I am my own promise, a soul within myself, the only person opposite who stays an eternity and through consistency whose love can nurture me back into believing I am worthy of being loved and that I am loved. In juxtaposition to searching for the love of substance through another’s affections, you cannot predict the emotional tides of the oceans of others. Love becomes a hope through guessing, training yourself into a reflex mode of desiring and neediness through the act of flashes of love, inconsistent displays, and an unhealthy attachment to a (not) love that does not show itself, but, you believe, is still there. Yet, self-love harshly rejects a love that is an act of settling. Self-love gives me autonomy in my emotional quest. Self-love transforms love from an act one waits for others to perform or display to an act that one has the limitless potential to use and adore on oneself. Moreover, self-love disrupts the tension of potential, turning the stagnant potential into fulfilled acts of self-empowerment and power well used— a more auspicious alternative to that of a man’s affection.Â
Through the bumps and mishaps, or sufferings through plagues of self-doubt and locusts of lowlifes, I have truly begun to embrace the love around me, gone ignored, laying in potential, as the emotional gratification that I have been endlessly searching for. Amidst romantic juxtapositions, kisses and tears, sex and hate, truth and lies, I have unexpectedly found myself beginning to fall out of love with men, and into love with myself. I no longer suffer as severely from a complex of failing to be loved, because after all, loving myself lasts longer than a fling with a Chad ever would. As I have purveyed through my universe of impure intentions, where incels existed for instant gratification, I realize the emotional longevity that I so desire is only possible if only I am the cultivator of my desires, and no one else. Love is an experience so intimate, why not save the best for myself? All too often loving ourselves is the hardest love of all, for that means accepting and nurturing the attributes we gain regular comfort in criticizing. When we give love to someone else, all we see is the radical potential of the beautiful and become oblivious to the manifestations of criticisms in them, that we see so clearly in ourselves. If we, if I, want a love that is to be applauded, then to love myself is a greater accomplishment than loving another. I’ve started to see the perfections within the imperfections. I have started to counter my criticism with self-assuredness, a confidence that is ever-growing and ever-loving, although still stumbling at times. Â
To love myself is the fullest love of all, for I am not, like in others, exclusively loving the obvious beauty. More importantly, the love for myself encapsulates both that which I champion and that which I tend to avoid. It is a love that is trying to love all that it comes into contact with. Self-love does not exclude, nor does it depend on waiting for the intentions of others to be bestowed upon you. Self-love takes action all on its own, chasing after what it wants, a powerful whirlwind without another. I am realizing how beautiful I am, and in that realization of my own beauty, motivation blossoms for my actions to get what I want, to dance after my desires, no longer exclusively waiting for a man to attain. Letting go of self-criticism, my incongruencies and imperfections have begun to bloom, instead of wither, and I am beauty in a well-rounded form. While we often wait for love to come fill us up, sometimes the only way to feel most full is by loving ourselves instead of someone who sits opposite of us at a restaurant table. Akin to Miley Cyrus, I truly can buy myself flowers, and I can write my name in the sand. I can talk to myself for hours, and say lots of wonderful, empowering, funny, and original things that others don’t understand. I am myself, and there is infinite wonder and potential at my fingertips. I don’t need to be stagnant to search for what I can find. I can move, why wait for others to move first?Â