The Champagne Soapbox

“love is patient, love is kind. love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. it does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.”

i have always reflected on this verse, so much that i questioned if it even heartbreak when it wasn’t love in the first place? are we capable of experiencing love without it even being love? are they just annual infatuations? what is a love letter without a denotation of desperation or hope this is it? what is the anxiety in hoping that your attempts will be matched, and if you’re lucky, with more than anticipated?

alike most girls my age, or maybe not, we are obsessed with the idea of love. most girls of my generation were developmentally skewed by the idea that happiness is when the prince shows up and helps you down from a suffocating tower of isolation, or recognizes your worth once he realizes you look better with makeup on and a new hairstyle, or understands that you’re not just one of the boys who loves beer and watches sports… you’re his soulmate! a lot of the times, we don’t even recognize how impactful these early representations of happiness were. ever since our cognitive development allowed, we have been trained to understand that love equates to happiness through plastic tiaras and songs. we may not believe it now, and it’s obviously famous enough in the discourse of female love to have become a cliche, but before we could even form words- we were being taught that love is shown to us when our prince charming teaches us how to love ourselves. bullshit.

at my age, girls go to bars, boys buy their drinks, girls think about what his parents look like or how he introduced her to his friends without hesitations, boys (at least the worst ones) wake up mad that they spent money on a girl who wouldn’t put out. girls go to coffee shops, boys make eye contact with girls, girls think about that interaction and romanticize how they’ll tell their children how he drank his coffee with whole milk the day they met. girls go to school, boys go to school, girl wears a calculated outfit that does not show much skin but just enough to be perceived as casual and cute, boys only notice girls with greek letters. girls post on instagram after editing their body for hours, boys like pictures, girls show notifications to their friends and don’t check the app for the rest of the day.

this could easily be an autobiographical analysis about the love i did or did not receive when i was younger, but i like to believe it was our culture that promoted me to follow a romanticized life. girls (see above) are so primed to desire and secure love that it is often second thought behind our image. it is engrained behind every social media post, behind any interaction with an interest of attraction, and often times written in the unwritten step-stone of life accomplishments. love is not a goal to reach before you begin “aging” or reach past the point of unacceptable child-bearing age. because love is obviously not the young repetition of romanticizing sweaty dudes at bars or guys with their dogs at coffee shops or earning random social gratification from the desired interest, i am forced to believe, out of hope, that it is patient instead. i don’t think it will appear when you are starving or full, but only when you are perfectly satisfied with yourself that you allow someone to help you prepare the next meal.

it is human nature that considers failure when we are not able to find an answer to things. millions of grant money to academic researchers to prioritize finding the solution to such a specific problem that the majority of the English speaking population would not understand the concept explained simply. hundreds of religions discrediting each others beliefs because of books written by bone-rotten ancestors who spoke languages non-transcribable to the generation directly after them. people being murdered, in streets, over seas, about who is right and who is wrong and your whole country should consider this right too because we segmented another portion of our federal defense budget and martyred too many of our own people to protect against anyone who thinks otherwise of our national priorities. i’m not saying that any of these scenarios lack passion, purpose, or love AT ALL. i’m saying that sometimes finding the answer is deadly serious, and complicated. as much as we want to convince ourselves that love can be murderous or manipulative- love is simply kind.

i once always wanted a love that was hard so that it felt worth it, and i feel like a lot of women and men have to go through deep deprogramming to understand the balance between love and lesson. once a long (long long) time ago, i wanted a love that scratched the back of my brain so deep that every biological emotion would have a scar of their presence. i wanted a love that made me nauseated, for which i was able to confuse anxiety with utter excitement. i wanted a love so scary that my heart would stop beating and would only begin again when i heard my phone ring with a response. more than i would like to admit, i have sacrificed my own love for the sake of an unrequited one. calling friends endlessly to put my confusing collection of pieces together only for them to fall apart and have no assistance putting back together in the name of whatever i thought love was pre-maturely. part of maturing is realizing that love will not force you to sacrifice yourself for the sake of feeling any love at all. honestly, if you are at that point- that patient, kind love that i speak on is one that you should graciously dedicate to yourself, which is harder said than done.

loving yourself is, actually, probably the hardest, which is why i believe we find the concept of love to be so difficult in essence. we live in a world of critique. we are graded among performance and ask our classmate what their score was while sharing that we made 10 points higher than we did in reality. hold our images next together through an algorithm where skinny bitches with long hair are triumphed above your edited perception of whatever you may look like on a good day. annually, the person who basically funds your living will pull you into an office and describe the things you did well on, evaluate if those things are worth a reward, and in the worst case, end your relationship to this once secure establishment of financial stability. this is a working process, and this is not the blog post for me to describe to you how to accomplish whatever the $450 billion self-care market claims to sell or replicate some Refinery29 article about how women compensate for inequality in their love lives and families due to institutionalized patriarchy (which is valid and true).

learning how to love yourself, even in the instance that you believe that you are incapable of it, is the purest form of love there is. it is only a bonus if you get to share that love you have for yourself with someone else who believes it is worthy of celebrating, especially on valentine’s day. it’s also with your cat who is only able to rest on your chest so he can fall asleep to the sound of your heartbeat. it’s in the vulnerability between sharing a secret and it being accepted with unanticipated empathy. it’s in the stillness following that, lighting a candle and feeling how it’s smell consumes the space. in the texts that aren’t some guy just trying to see how far he can push your sexual boundaries. it’s accepting that although these moments are passing, they are yours.

when i reflect on if i have ever truly felt love, going by these principles, i would be selfish to only use that in reference to past relationships. that one time he bought you flowers, or drove when you were asleep in the passenger, or whatever else you like to fantasize about rather than understanding the reality of love. and honestly, the reality of love can be painful. it requires you to learn the truth behind your insecurities, and why you feel the need to post pretty pictures every time a guy lets you down. it forces you to compare all the love you have received before and trust that you have healed from that shattering realization that those were just lessons a stupid, love-hungry girl refused to learn at the time. it’s creating boundaries and defending them, even though it is much easier to accept their instability at the cost of your peace. standing up for yourself, staying silent, willing to disagree for the sake of your morality or agree to keep peace, and so much more than it being considered simply. we are literally products of love, so why do we believe we are incapable of accepting or giving it? because we accept the love we think we deserve.

I love the feeling of love, but love itself can be a risk. Sometimes it’s worth it to take the risk to feel loved, but would you do anything to simply be loved? It’s something to think about.

i like to believe that we all have some form of love in our life, whether that is through ourselves, our friends, or even a romantic partner. if those Disney princess movies taught me anything, it’s that happiness and love are both exclusive and contextual. give love, make love, and show love for what it’s worth in your capacity because that’s all that you can promise yourself, even if it’s unrequited, not returned, or unacknowledged.

if you are like me today, scrolling through posts of couples in love or whatever that means, prepping your 5 o’clock glass of sav cab, just know you are loved, regardless if you believe it or not. imagine you are someone who watches the news and sees several news stories of violence in your city. although your likelihood of being a victim of violence has not changed, the memory of violence in your city remains salient in your mind and makes you feel more vulnerable when leaving your home. the hate that exists in this world is much more salient than the love, but it is surely not more valuable.