There are two recurring types of posts that have been popping up all over my Twitter (oh, is anyone calling it X?) feed over the last few days, both dealing with love. One is a kind of argument. I didn’t try to follow it down the rabbithole to where it originated from, but essentially it looks like it’s between mostly combative, younger adults who say that friendships fill the void of not having romantic love, and those with more experience who insist that romance is its own sphere and that no measure of other kinds of love compensates for the absence of a partner.
The second is a text-based meme. It goes something like: “I have tasted romance. I have tasted ____ [something else – related or unrelated]. I recommend ____ [a hobby, a tangent, or in the case of food or money, always food or money].”
The astrologically-minded will say Venus is in retrograde, so is Mercury, and we’re flailing between eclipses, which is why this collective rankling towards and mooning about the subject of love is happening. I’ll guess I’ll take accept reason, and extend the discourse to more than 280 characters too.
Let me make my position clear: I’m among those who say that nothing else in the relational field can quite replace having a good partner. At 39 and having unsuccessfully sought Love with a capital L for over two decades — and having been sorely disappointed by attempts to build kinship and interpersonal infrastructure, with ideals often discarded when those “kindred” coupled up — I’m sure. Also, well, as I have not tasted romance, at least not of the reciprocal variety, I really cannot make a droll post using that other template. I have tasted bitterness, I have tasted undesirability, and I recommend living a lonely life for a little longer before being quick to judge those who name, rather than deny, their lonesomeness.
Don’t get me wrong: at 23, at 30, at 36, I committed to myself, to living beyond the margins if need be but living anyway and loving in any way I could. I wrote reams, even here in this space, about this life and its choices. The day I learned that the population of single women in this country (most will eventually or already live alone) is equivalent to the population of Tamil Nadu, I sat with my back straighter and my eyes glittering toward the horizon. I have lived my entire adult life as someone who decentred partnership and created meaning without it. But I decentred partnership because I could neither find love nor acquiesce into a traditional role with or without it. Its absence has shaped my life and determined my choices, too. I have always owned this.
An unconventional life, chosen or otherwise, takes tenacity. It requires feeling deeply, not lying to oneself and remaining true to who one is — even that isn’t who one wants to be. It requires evolution and recalibration, too. I’m curious what I’ll be saying at the cusp of 50. I hope to get there, and further — and with all my heart, hope to not still be on my own then.