in my most decadent, salacious fantasies, somebody loves me. it has always been this way. perhaps i am thinking of my best friend surprising me on my birthday, perhaps i am picturing my parents apologising to me (or visiting me in my university town, which almost never happens). or maybe i’m imagining a backyard wedding and a speech from a friend telling everyone how proud they are of me, complete with inside jokes and tears. in this fantasy, the groom changes, as does the guest list. but the general mood is the same, and the speech always has the same undertone: look how far you’ve come. look how many people showed up for you. we love you, we love you.
in the darkest iteration of these scenarios, which often comes to me before bed, or in dull seminars, i am a famous author. my singular autobiographical novel, which is all it took to become successful, has been adapted into a film without forcing me to sacrifice creative control. in interviews, i am asked time and time again which aspects of the plot were based on my real life, and which are fiction. and so i spill my guts, on camera, i list every way i’ve ever been wronged, and everyone is on my side. finally, i am understood, and all my guilt is absolved.
i have had nine boyfriends, one girlfriend, and seven situationships with varying levels of emotional reciprocation (i have bad luck with girls). i have slept with six people. each time i believed i was madly in love, that this particular person was the one, that we would find a way to make it work. i grew up on the concept of ‘the one’ and i was desperate to find my own. something i didn’t think of until last year, though, was the fact that if any of these people were the one, they would have actually wanted to be with me.
i’m not entirely sure where this idea of ‘the one’ came from. my mother has never been married, my father has been married twice (engaged four times) and nobody in my family has ever referred to their partners as such. perhaps it was the obsessive rewatching of how i met your mother that did it. perhaps it was the all the love songs, or young adult novels. perhaps it was favourite book as a child, just listen by sarah dessen, in which a girl falls in love with a troubled boy who helps her get justice against her rapist. maybe it’s astrology - my venus is in cancer, after all.
whatever the reason, i have been both blessed and cursed with the issue of too much love. i have so much of it to give, and nowhere to put it. at school my sensitivity was seen as melodramatic and offputting, because i was overweight with an unflattering haircut and braces. when i got to university, my awkward shell cracked slowly, then suddenly, and i seemed to become an attractive woman. i’m still overweight, and i still have an unflattering haircut, whatever that means, but somewhere along the line the criteria have shifted. this emotional whiplash has created a huge problem of cognitive dissonance: i am convinced that everyone wants to sleep with me, but i am also convinced that i have an inherent ugliness, a casing of unloveability that will prevent me from ever feeling true intimacy with another human being. consequently, i will entertain anyone i can get, before the supply runs out.
when someone is always in a relationship, or always crushing on someone, people like to say that they have no sense of self, no sense of independence. but i don’t think that’s always true. i have a strong set of principles, i have an exceedingly long list of nuanced and contradictory likes and dislikes, and i ‘ve had some running jokes with myself for the last fifteen years. i know how to love myself better than anyone i’ve ever met. it’s just not enough. it’s not that i can’t go through life alone, that i can’t rely on my friends or my work or my hobbies, it is that i simply don’t want to. everything good in my life i need to share with someone, or it doesn’t feel like it’s really mine at all.
in the season two finale of girls, hannah, played by lena dunham, is going through it. she’s cut her hair into a spiky not-quite-bowl cut in a moment of mental distress. her ears are swaddled in bandages after sticking cotton buds in them and rupturing her eardrums, and her apartment is a disaster. she’s in an obsessive-compulsive spiral and it’s not pretty. by accident, she facetimes her ex-boyfriend adam, and when he sees how much she’s struggling he runs across brooklyn to save her. the scene is so tense and agonising and beautiful, until he reaches the apartment and everything stops. he gingerly picks her up, kisses her, and the episode ends. i rewatch it on youtube all the time, mentally superimposing my face and that of whoever i’m yearning for on to each of the characters. it doesn’t help that i also have a toxic relationship with cotton buds. i am writing this with dulled hearing in my left ear, because i just can’t ignore the need for every part of my body to be clean. but that’s a separate issue.
frank o’hara once wrote: ‘i am the least difficult of men. all i want is boundless love.’ when i talk about this quote in a seminar, i try not to use the words ‘literally me’ and say something more profound, but the effort of thinking about all the ways i relate to him makes me feel like i’m about to burst. naturally, this obsession with romance makes me terrible at casual dating. after one date i’m tweeting things like ‘i’m in love’ and weighing up the pros and cons of eloping. i would never say any of this to the person themselves, though, because it’s deeply inappropriate and insane. i simply laugh at their jokes, and listen to the songs they recommend, and wear perfume that makes me smell like a dessert. sometimes i go too far, and lead someone on by accident, at which point i have to ghost them and pretend it never happened. henry, if you’re reading this (i hope not) you’re a lovely person, and i’m sorry. you just got caught up in something bigger than you.
this entry could have gone in many directions. at first i was going to write about the history of ‘the one’ as a concept in popular culture, and then i was going to write about how bad online dating is (but we’ve heard it all before), and then i was going to write an extremely detailed and self-involved list of all the stupid and embarrassing things i’ve done for love. perhaps i will still write all of those essays. but right now, with the rise of ‘real lover’ and ‘real yearner’ memes, i feel it’s only right to confess.
thank you so much for reading! if you have any tips on how to survive casual dating, let me know. if you’re a real lover like me, also let me know so i feel less insane. as well as substack i also write music reviews for my university newspaper, and my latest review of the new eliza mclamb album, going through it, is available to read here.
i hope january was good to you all, and i’ll be back soon.
love, riley
When I was obsessed with romantic love, I also believed I loved myself. But then I stopped and poured the overwhelming love into myself only to realise that I did indeed love myself, and yet there was so much of myself I needed to love more. There's always a part of yourself that can receive what the world is not offering to house for you.
the start of the essay really resonated with me. it's such a tiring feeling, carrying all that love around from here to there.