Love Ruins It

learning to let love be is the hardest lesson of all

I grew up in a family that says “I love you,” often. We end phone calls and family gatherings with those three words. We call each other up, sometimes for no other purpose than just to let the family know that nothing has changed, we still love them.

I also came of age in the late 1980’s, where it seemed like every tv show and film seemed to be obsessed with scenes where characters are too proud or scared to be the first to say “I love you.” Hollywood made it look like love was the worst thing that could happen to a relationship, and if it did fall in love you should definitely turn any expression of that into some tense, emotional power struggle.

We were too broke then to catch flights, so we were supposed to just sit around nonchalantly in our feelings, hoping someone else would say it first, I guess.

I am convinced this weird standoff about love is the villain origin story of love ruining shit.

The force of evil plans
To make you its possession
And it will if we let it
Destroy everybody

-Stevie Wonder

Caleb and I had been making some of the best love you can imagine for 7 years. When I look back at all of my sexual partners during that time, he was easily top 5 of that era. Not bad for a cis guy.

And we made love. I met him just before entering my Saturn return and just after mastering being multiple orgasmic. It was my season to fall in love and here comes this honey pot, paying for every bill and laying pipe like the army corps of engineers. We golfed weekly, traveled together frequently, dined divinely between wild nights devouring each other with wined stained teeth. We bought other whores and friends into our beds and devoured them too. It was as if we both plateaued at our sexual peak and stayed there for almost a decade. And I loved him and every minute we spent together.

But then love had to go and ruin shit. Not love itself, but the mere mention of it changed everything. One slow, rainy morning in Nu’uanu Valley, I floated out of the bed and poured my coffee, and stretched out on the couch next to the chocolate lab that had become my stepdog. I looked up at him all smiling, overflowing with gratitude for joining me in the plethora of orgasms I had the night before and said without hesitation, “I really fucking love you.”

His look immediately made me wonder if I would soon regret that choice of words. I could see him stammer behind his eyes, and I interrupted his thoughts, letting him know that unlike all those tv shows, I didn’t need to hear it back. Even more, I didn’t want to. I wanted this declaration of love to be a celebration for my happy vagina and heart, as we were coming up on 7 years of pure epicurean, non-monogamous bliss, with no bullshit and no rules. I wanted to share the fact that we had done what modern love said was impossible, to be in pleasure and in love in whatever ways we felt like it, whenever we felt like it. We won. But love confused him and within a few weeks, the whole thing was ruined.

Love ruined the way we connected and interacted, as he tried to figure out what to do with that love. That same love that had been there for years for me was like a discovery to this man and he started looking for ways to package it all up for us. He picked that love apart like a country man does a catfish, leaving the bones clean of all that juicy, succulent meat that makes one moan. He asked me for some form of monogamy I had no desire to sully love with, eventually leaving us to walk away from that conversation a shell of what we were. In the coming days we would split and never speak again.

Love ruins shit.

Love has us afraid to say that we feel it, it leaves us braced for untimely departures in its acknowledgement, and run when we hear it. We are like puppies with the zoomies, chasing our tails looking for it and then freaking out when we realize it's been there the whole time. Once we realize we have it, it is not enough to be in it—we want to make it so difficult that we have to struggle to prove we are supposed to have it. Every conversation seems to become about how to keep it and not how to be it.

Why do we insist on making love ruin shit, when it is so foreign to us.

We are terrified of love because we don’t know it at all. We expect it to the set-up for abandonment, abuse, depletion and betrayal, so as soon as we are in it we brace for suffering. Yet, we want it so bad that we are ready to fight for it, suffer for it, and never give up on trying to have it. We perform femininity and masculinity exhaustively in hopes to meet it, and love and endurance become almost indistinguishable.

Why can’t we let love be?

Why can’t the lover say the beautifully harrowing thing on her mind without bracing for the impact of love ending? Why can’t the friend share something without feeling vulnerable to love’s betrayal? Why does the appearance of another lover in the space where love warms everything it touches, freeze us up? Why do we want to cage it up so it doesn’t spill out and away from us, fearing we will never find the thing that exists inside of us? Why do we let love ruin everything??

If love simply is, if it is just allowed to be, it wouldn’t ruin anything at all.