What Love Isn't

When you’ve never loved, or been loved in a romantic way before it’s difficult to know what’s right. You think love is innocent- it’s holding hands in the cinema, going on cute dates, the occasional grand romantic gesture. After all, everything you knew about love you learned from watching romantic comedies, where unions were always perfect and by the end of the movie there’s no such thing as having made a wrong choice.

So when you finally venture out into the adult world and someone comes along and tells you they love you, you believe them. There was no fluttering in your stomach, no warmth in your chest, but you don’t know what love feels like, and so you think maybe this is it. People say real-life isn’t like the movies, but you wanted to believe in those cinematic happy endings all the same, so you said “okay”. He looked happy, said he was overjoyed, talked about how nervous he was to tell you that and you take it all in.

There was a little voice in your head that said he barely knew you. “But on the other hand,” you think, “no one’s ever told me they liked me before - I’ll take what I can get”.

You let him take your hand and just like that, you stepped out of the world of silly unrequited schoolyard crushes. At eighteen years old you got your first boyfriend. You feel grown up, and a little less out of place.

He writes songs about you, songs inspired by you. He says it was because he couldn’t stop thinking about you. He tells you it’s because you’re the prettiest girl he’s ever met. You’ve never been called pretty, and you’re a little flattered. It’s nice the first few times, but when he continued to say “I like you because you’re pretty” you wondered if he cared about your personality at all.

He doesn’t get the jokes you make. Doesn’t particularly care about the books or the music you like. You thought that was okay because those weren’t dealbreakers. When he started commenting on how he didn’t like that you wore jeans and flannel shirts instead of dresses you respect his opinion and bought new clothes. “Now you look so much prettier” he says.

Because he loved you he made sure he was the only person in your life you could rely on. He whisks you away after class before you get a chance to talk to anyone, saying he wants to take you somewhere. Your conversations with classmates rarely go beyond cordial greetings. He’s insistent, so you leave with him. At lunch he takes pictures of you from across the table, saying how you “look Japanese” while asking you to tilt your head down so your face looks slimmer.

You wanted to have conversations. Talk about things that weren’t his songwriting, his friends, his card tricks, and how you looked. You hoped he would see you for who you were, because you didn’t spend your life reading books just for someone to judge you by your cover.

Despite your reservations, you always took him at his word- that he loved and cared about you, and had your best interests at heart. He was older and knew better, and he was so self-assured that you never thought to question if things really were the way he said they were. So when he got angry and upset with you, you assumed it was your fault. Everything always seemed to be, and he was a ticking time bomb. You’ve seen his anger in full display, and even though deep down you knew it wasn’t normal, what else could you do but to try and calm him down?

You apologise for everything. It didn’t matter if you knew what you were apologising for, as long as it meant he wouldn’t be in a mood anymore. You fulfil all his demands because you didn’t want him to get angry and you’d have to repeat the whole charade again. You drive to him whenever he said he wanted to see you, do whatever he says. It’s taxing, you’re tired, but afterwards he comes around and says he loves you, and all you can say is “okay”.

He tells you that being in a relationship took effort, that he was always putting in an effort for you. Like the time he bought you jewellery you never asked for, or paid for your meals. Never mind that whatever money he had, his parents made. He says that while you did the bare minimum you never went out of the way to make him happy. Besides, you were beginning to gain weight and you were starting to look ugly.

You try harder. Put down your fork when he said “Are you seriously going to finish all that food?”. You forgo family dinners despite wanting very much to be there, just so he wouldn’t feel neglected. You get very good at pretending, that you were happy, in love, that you actually give a fuck.

You keep it up for years. You wanted it to be love, you wanted to believe that someone who loves you couldn’t possibly be an asshole. You’ve had bad times but it wasn’t all bad, was it? But when you think about all hoops you had to constantly jump through, the exhaustion made the decision for you and you wanted to stop being the clown. When you were finally brave enough to tell him you were leaving, he sends you a song he wrote about you just to make the decision harder.

It was naive of you not to consider that the world isn’t filled with rainbows, that bad things happen to good people. You wanted to believe in pure intentions and true love, so you refuse to see things that don’t fit into the narrative. Sometimes it was easier to continue living in the little bubble you created than it was to see things the way they actually were. (It also doesn’t help that it’s really fucking hard to see manipulation when you’re right in the midst of it).

But you walked away. Slightly damaged but more or less in one piece. You grow up.

Sometimes you think about when you were eighteen and you wish you hadn’t been so blind. You wish you had said something to someone, that you had been stronger.

So you do what your younger self couldn’t do, in the best way you know how- you write it down. Because through it all there was something important you learned, that if you had known earlier perhaps would’ve made all the difference. You learned what love isn’t.