The first time I fell in love, I cried.
The thunderstorm that moved across the sky that night raged as I stared at the blades of my ceiling fan, spinning and spinning around. Outside, hot rain met hot cement and created a petrichor that lifted off of the ground. Inside, the air was heavy. The broken air conditioning left me with only a ceiling fan, pushing the warm air around my room. I was lying above the covers in shorts, sweaty and irritable. Everything was still. In a flash of heat, the memory of this boy clouded my mind. Not even the ninety-degree summers I had experienced for seventeen years could prepare me for the warmth that spread from the tips of my toes to the ends of my fingers at the thought of him.
We first met at school. I was enamored with the way that he laughed. He laughed easily, like it cost him nothing. He laughed with his entire body, as if the ground beneath him was shaking. I didn’t know him then, but I was undoubtedly attracted to the way he seemed whole and real in a way I didn’t know how to be. We became close friends, formed a comfortable relationship that blossomed in the ten minute breaks we spent together between classes and flourished in our late-night study sessions. It was a friendship that felt like kindergarten, when children create an unbreakable bond over shared crayons. We didn’t need an introduction or time to warm up to each other. We simply understood each other on a fundamental level without any aids.
Our friendship held steady for years. Under the surface, there was always a feeling that we wanted each other. It came and went — a spark every time our fingers brushed as he handed me a pen, tension whenever our eyes met over our textbooks during group assignments, long stares that I could feel on me as he told our friends a joke and watched for my reaction. We played this game, a cat and a mouse, a prey and a predator, for a long time. That summer, it became clear that I was the mouse. I was caught. It felt like a death sentence.
We went on our first date exactly one year after that summer night. Predictably, it was disastrous. He drove an hour to come see me, ready to court me, ready to meet my parents, and ready to “do this thing properly.” I should have been elated, but instead I felt like I had dug my own grave. I could not stop myself from imagining the worst case scenarios of our entanglement. That maybe, it would end in disaster, neither of us able to look at the other anymore for fear of a violent urge to strangle the unsaid words out of the other’s throat. Or worse, that it would lead to bliss, to two souls intertwined and indistinguishable, no words necessary to express how we belonged to each other. In either case, I would lose something integral to myself.
We are never taught to love. In the media and in life, love is seen as something that is intrinsic. It is seen as something that we stumble upon accidentally, something that we know to do without instruction. This view of love has always troubled me, because how can we be expected to recognize something that is so intangible? How can I be expected to act on something that I do not know beyond a vague understanding that it is never ending want? Our society sets us up for failure when it describes love as an accident, as something that happens to a person rather than something that a person does.
The first time I fell in love, I could not understand why it was so crushing. I could not understand why, if everyone else could bear the weight of love, I could not. I was bothered by the thought that I had no choice but to be in love with someone. If love happens to you, then can you really exert any control over yourself? Can you claim yourself to be a rational, autonomous person? Or are we all just subject to our emotions in an uncontrollable, chaotic way? The idea that my autonomy was taken made me resentful. I felt unsettled that, for this boy, I would have to surrender to my heart.
In today’s times, we are not told the consequences of love. It is more than sex, more than trust, more than a primal instinct. Love is a choice. It is a verb. It is an action. When we choose to love someone romantically, we are choosing to commit to that person. This commitment goes further than the vague wish for marriage-somewhere-down-the-line-if-things-work-out or I’d-like-to-have-a-kid-one-day. It is a pledge, an oath, to be present. When you choose to love someone, you are choosing to spend time with them. You are choosing to think of them, always. You are choosing to forgo your free time for them, to limit the time you spend with friends or family to spend time with them instead. People always say you can maintain your relationship and your friendships at the same time, but in reality, all you can do is strike a balance between them. When you choose to love someone, you cannot be present for the other people in your life in the same capacity as before. Time is not an infinite resource. There are twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, fifty-two weeks in a year. Time is finite and quantifiable. It necessarily follows that if you decide to welcome a lover into your life, you siphon off your time in order to make time for them. This necessitates that you forgo time spent doing anything else. It is a commitment of incredible magnitude to love someone.
Conversely, it is also a commitment of great magnitude to not love someone. When you don’t feel love for another person, don’t feel that pitter-patter of your heart when you see them, you commit yourself to something different: solitude. Solitude has its consequences as well. When you are alone, you are unknown. You might have friends and family, but they rarely, if ever, fit the way that a lover does. They rarely know the things about you that matter, like how you think or why you behave a certain way. For the most part, people who never fall in love never become known, wholly and truly. And because they are not known, they cannot be accepted. They cannot be accepted in a genuine manner because while their friends and family might accept them, their friends and family don’t know them or understand them in the unspoken manner that a lover does. I realize that I’ve veered into the abstract, vague description of love that I just condemned, so I’ll elucidate with an example.
My entire life, I’ve always said that to love is to know. So, to be loved is to be known. I’ve felt known very few times in my life. One night, during the same summer that I realized the depth of my feelings for my first love, we were on the phone. It was late in the evening or early in the morning, depending on how you looked at it. My mind was cloudy with drowsiness, the lullaby of static and whispers of half sentences on the other line transporting me to sleep. The boy spoke, and he asked, “Why is loyalty so important to you?” Maybe to others, this wouldn’t be a memorable question. But when I heard it, I felt known. It isn’t a trait that I tend to advertise, but loyalty is the cornerstone of all of my relationships and a virtue that I strive to embody. I believe in promises, I believe in oaths, and I believe that when you befriend someone, you are pinky-promising to them that you are their companion for as long as they will allow you to be. Unwavering loyalty is integral to genuine friendship, but most people don’t recognize what it looks like in life. It is not simply defending your friend, although that is important. It is a constant show of support. Like most valuable traits, it is in the little gestures. It’s in the way that my friends know to hug me when I am having a bad day. It’s in the way that my father makes me coffee every morning, without fail. It’s in the way that this boy knew to reach for my hand because he knew that most of the time, I crave closeness. It’s constant, never ending support. It’s allegiance. It’s the kind of thing that kings and knights used to swear on, something noble, something more. My belief in loyalty, my loyalty to the concept of fidelity, is not something that one can easily see in me. I express my loyalty in the little things as well: taking notes for my friends on the days that they are absent from school, hand-making birthday cards for my loved ones, picking up the phone at any time in any place so that they know that I care. It’s my unwavering faith in my friends’ capabilities as people and as professionals. It is something you can only know if I tell you, as I am doing right now, or if you watch me when no one else is watching and listen to me when I am silent. This question, an acknowledgement that he had seen me, made me feel known. It made me feel loved. Moments like that, when I felt understood, are not easy to encounter. It takes a special connection with a special person. The fact that not even my closest friends or family members could recognize it solidifies the belief that love is deeper than those platonic and familial bonds. It is a choice.
To never experience that, or worse, to never open yourself up enough to experience that, is a commitment to solitude. It is a commitment to that feeling of being untethered to a person of importance, to an emotion that makes you feel alive. Don’t misunderstand me, it is not a commitment to feeling nothing. If anything, it is a commitment to feeling everything, the weight of all your emotions and desires, with no one to share them with and no one who will understand. It takes strength to choose to be alone.
The framing of love as a thing that happens, rather than a choice, makes people unaware that they do have authority over who and what they love and whether or not those people and things love them back. Frequently, I have heard statements such as “No one in my area understands me” or “Nobody has the same interests as I do” or “No one fits my type”, but is this really the case? Is it always true that people are incompatible with their peers or surroundings, or is it more likely that those same people don’t know how to open themselves up, to choose to want love rather than settle for self-sufficiency?
To make that choice to be or not to be in love is difficult. It is excruciating to consider, but it is made worse by a lack of knowledge of what love is. We all have competing definitions of love, and I am sure people disagree with my characterization, as we have different experiences. We’re entitled to those differences in thoughts, but to those who never consider love, it is paramount that they discover for themselves what their choice will be.
Ultimately, I unknowingly chose love, and I could not bear the consequences. I gave my heart to this boy. I stayed up with him on his worst nights and celebrated him on his best nights. I nursed his pride and set aside my own. I took his side and frequently compromised my own values. When I realized on that scorching summer night what I had done, what I had chosen, I cried. I cried because despite all of the emphasis that I placed on loyalty, I had failed to stay loyal to myself. I had given up little parts of myself every time I forgave him for unconscionable mistakes, every time I gave him any and all emotion I could spare, every time I wasted my sanity on ridiculous and obsessive thoughts of him. Above all, I value autonomy. Yet, I had allowed mine to be stolen. I allowed myself to become enraptured with him, caught in his spider web, and it cost me time and effort that I should have spent on myself. By the end, I relied on him. I could forgive him for anything, but I could not forgive myself for that. Just as I chose to love him, I chose to love myself more. I let him go.
The road to recovery from my self-inflicted heartbreak was long and difficult. I had given so much of myself up that I had very little left. I had to rebuild, like cities do after disasters. Slowly, piece by piece and brick by brick, I mended the parts of me that I had torn away to accommodate him in my heart and my consciousness. I stopped apologizing for my emotions, as I learned to do so as to spare his feelings. I began to allow myself to keep secrets, to choose which parts of myself I wanted to share, which I could not do because he pressured me to open up. I indulged in the simple silence with which he was always so uncomfortable. Slowly but surely, I stitched myself whole again. Every now and then, when I see this boy in the halls or hear someone mention his name, I feel a pang of hurt where those stitches are. It’s as if I’m recovering from surgery, like an organ was taken out of my body and I have to learn to adjust to the foreign sensations of living without a part of myself that used to be there. But that feeling of loss is infinitely preferable to the feeling that I had caged myself, tied myself to a person who could only take parts of me.
I don’t regret loving that boy. I never will. It has been so hard to let go, to stop picking at the scars I have over my chest from letting him cut me open. I chose myself in the end, and that couldn’t have been possible without him. Until him, I hadn’t realized that selfishness was something I could choose. To love or not to love is an individual’s choice. To love and allow the core parts of you to fade away is a choice as well. Is it better to be alone and free or together with another and caged? There is no true answer. But there are right answers, answers suitable for every individual, and we all owe it to ourselves to consider love as an action. We must consider love as a choice.
