Ara Ara’s Mind

{AN: Another Creative Non-fiction piece I wrote for my class. For a long time I had a specific perception of what love looked and felt like. So, when I get into my first relationship, which I am still, I started to make myself worried because I wasn’t feeling what I thought I would feel. For this assignment we were supposed to interview a person we weren’t related to. I did not do that. So, shout out to my mom for answering these questions and shout out to Yolanda for being my cover. Enjoy!}

How do you know what love feels like? I thought I knew, but, apparently, I don’t because I wouldn’t be in my bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub, wondering if I have made everything up. My first committed relationship continued to hit the same point. Where neither of us knew how to fix the attention problem that had been looming over the relationship. It felt as though we had tried everything possible to fix this ongoing issue, but nothing seems to be working. The fairy lights in my bathroom move around me as I start to feel incapable of fixing anything.  It wasn’t always like that. At first, it felt like I was living in a fairytale. After crushing on him for two years and knowing him for longer it felt surreal to actually get into a relationship. He was, and is, my highschool sweetheart. We fell for each other really fast without thinking about how it would affect and change the soon-to-be high school graduates that had yet to grow. With college looming it became more about just being together than figuring out how to be in a relationship. Being long distance exposed all those flaws that we never go to face together. Now in our second year together we are having to face the troubles from far away. It made me question myself and my commitment to this relationship. Am I the problem? What if that’s the reason we can’t fix anything? What if I’m just not in love?

I always thought love was going to be easy. At least easy to identify. In almost every book I read, love was always a sure thing. It happened instantaneously, with no thought no challenge. Those books were the only thing I had to go off of on what love looked like. I thought this quick attraction and adoration that was in “Everything, Everything” was going to happen to me. “I was happy before I met him. But I’m alive now, and those are not the same thing.” (Yoon 181) I believed that. I believed that love was supposed to make you feel alive, more like yourself. I believed that if I never found that type of love my life would be meaningless. No one told me that it wasn’t real. No one suggested that I shouldn’t get so caught in that fictional world. So I wandered around middle and high school waiting for someone to give me a certain look or show any sign of interest, but it never really happened. Those books made me feel like you had to know immediately that you were in love. 

My mind splits in two as I continue to worry myself and calm down at the same time. This situation had proven to be different from the last. Usually, when this happens I take time to think about how to fix the issue. This time it felt unnecessary, almost impossible. I thought I had been doing good. I thought the issue had been resolved. It began to feel like nothing I did was good enough. Like nothing I was doing up to that made a difference to him. My mind could no longer think of anything good but instead furthered me into confusion and fear. My head felt like it was about to explode. With my hands on my head, I begged for all this to just figure itself out.  There was no space to wonder if this is just what my type of love felt like. It just felt as if it was wrong. I started to believe that I was just holding on because I didn’t want to be alone. I started to feel bad. I’m sitting on the bathtub crying on the phone when I might not even be in love. 

I have always associated love with the heart. If anything regarding love happened to me, I just assumed the heart would feel the effects. So as I went through my middle school crush betraying me and dating my friend and having my current boyfriend reject me for two years I would prepare myself for how my heart would feel like. I always thought that my heart would hurt, crack and crumble into pieces. I always anticipated the heartache as I sent a risky text or planned to confront my crush. But, it never came. All that happened was a strange feeling in my stomach. As if all the things I was carrying in my chest suddenly dropped into my stomach. I thought that those situations didn’t affect me because I didn’t feel it in my heart. But, I still had this intense longing in my stomach when everything was said and done. 
Once the idea of not being in love popped into my head I knew I would have to figure it out. I didn’t have the answers and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to trust any reassuring thing I thought of. So, I took to google and quickly typed “Am I in love quiz” as to not raise suspicion. The first thing that popped up was Quizony’s “Am I in Love? – Quiz” (Jenn). Once off the phone, I dived into this quiz. The questions started easy. “Do you like spending time with this person?”, “Can this person do wrong?”(Jenn). Things I knew how to answer. As the questions kept coming it got harder and harder to answer and then, near the end of the quiz, it asked “Does this person feel like home?” (Jenn).  That is where I got stumped.  

The idea of my partener feeling like home is something I have never understood. I understand feeling safe and secure within your relationship but defining that as home seems strange to me. It seems strange to denote one person as your home. I don’t understand it and before this moment I never applied this saying to my relationship. This feeling people have for home is something I have never felt. My anxiety has never allowed me to feel safe wherever I was. So I never see anyone as home I see them as an addition to myself. Like an add-on, they upgrade and help me when I need it and in turn, help them. 

That question kept me up. I had no answer and nothing to go off of. I searched on google more and found nothing useful. My mind was restless and unwavering. I started to realize that my definition of home had been flawed. I began to believe that not seeing him as home meant that we were doomed. Then it dawned on me, I had to feel something for my boyfriend of two years. While I wasn’t sure what it was I knew it had to be there. So before bed, I went back to google. This time I typed in “am I still in love”. As I typed it in I couldn’t help but feel like one of those people who rely on google for everything. I couldn’t even tell myself how I felt I needed a random website that google decided applied to me to tell me how I feel. I looked at three different pages before I found one that actually helped. It was Medium’s “8 Signs You’re Still in Love” article that helped put my mind at ease. “1. You Wish Things Were Different” (Walker) when I read this I immediately felt like this didn’t apply to me. I didn’t want things to be different, I just wanted to figure things out. I kept reading through points, each one talking about things that I saw as no-brainers. When I got to “6. Your Fights Affect You Deeply” (Walker) I knew that I had a better situation than my mind was letting me think. The things I read in that article are things that I could never imagine myself not doing in this relationship. 

Constantly, I am letting my anxiety and worry convince me that I am not in love. Just because it doesn’t feel the way I was told it should. In the days following that night, I continued to reflect on what I pictured love to be. I realized that I had let the media I consumed and produced define what my love looked like. Through looking at quizzes and articles, love seemed to be the same, everyone knew how it felt and how it should feel. Feeling anything but the way it has been stated is a cause for panic. Love is always depicted as understandable, conforming, and perfect. Even when people talk about love it is in the same way it always is: there are right ways and there are wrong ways. That night in my bathroom I felt my world caving in once I compared my love to what I was told it was. For years, I lived under the pretense that the love I found would be similar to a teenage romance novel. Once I realized it wasn’t that anymore, I panicked because I was told that was what real love was. Even feeling everything in my stomach worried me. I was worried that since I didn’t feel the effects of love in my chest, either I was wrong or my relationship was wrong. Everyone thinks that love sits in your heart and festers and longs. When that isn’t what love is at all. Love means and feels different for everyone and finding out what it means for yourself is a part of truly understanding it.

After that night in my bathroom, I knew this was something I would need to write about. Not just for class but mainly for myself. I knew writing would be the only way to fully express coherent thoughts about love. When diving into writing I realized how many notions surrounded love. Even in my interview with Yolanda, a family friend, this view of love reared its head. I asked her what her first love felt like she said “Like overwhelming, uncontrollable, intense.” (Hicks 2). She wasn’t expecting much from her first love but even from that, she knew what love should and shouldn’t feel like. “…but you know that’s not, love shouldn’t feel like that, it should feel like this, this is just love.” (Hicks 3). It is a predetermined notion of what love is supposed to feel like and any questioning of or divergence from that definition of love makes you wrong. This notion also plagues the idea of home. It would seem like everyone defines home as welcoming, secure, and comfortable and any other definition of that is deemed as weird or strange. But, just like love, everyone has their definition. When I asked Yolanda if anyone felt like home to her she said “Mm, feel like home like that’s the one?” (Hicks 3). To here home meant “Comfortable, not pretentious, or like authentic, basic, not like ‘oh elaborate this and all that’ just like basic every day, consistent, unselfish…” (Hicks 3). Which I took to mean a known give and take. She has based this definition of home on how she grew up and what that felt like. To her, not only was it comfortable, but it was also just life. No gimmicks or plans, just living. 

While the idea of home and the idea of love can be viewed as synonymous, they aren’t always the same. What you define as home is always going to be constant, but love is ever-changing. In addition, home is one place that you go back to while love follows you. Love grows and travels with us. Love is found in every relationship, platonic or romantic. Love is found in objects, hobbies, places. Without love, there would be no home to turn back to. They feed into each other but they are not the same. Home is something that is almost always going to be there, but if you don’t know yourself you don’t know love. 

“The confused yeah maybe I am maybe I’m not, maybe they are maybe they’re not. Definitely. I think that might be how you know that it’s actually not love like if you have to guess?”(Hicks 3). After Yolanda said this, I realized that I have to define love for myself and there was no way I could do that without being confused. Confusion brings curiosity and that curiosity breaks the fantasy down into reality. So, I don’t entirely agree with what she said. Both parties being confused is one thing but I think that the confusion love brings is a part of understanding it. I have been idolizing a love that was not possible. I have to break out of the idea that my love would be like a movie or a fairy tale. I have to redefine love itself, every part of it. The part I share with my partner, the part I share with my family, the part I share with myself. Without this redefinition, I will never know how I feel without googling every emotion I have.