I hate ‘love’

Love…. How to reflect on perhaps one of my least favourite words? Pulling it apart is perhaps the easiest part of unraveling love, it’s putting it back together without cracks that becomes tough.

I’ve always seen love like a mirror… or a glass statue. Beautiful and reflective of one’s own self as well. But fragile. And once broken, it’s very hard to fix. Even if you do manage to put it back together, there’s always the cracks. And for a long time, I simple reference it as a mere chemical reaction in the brain. I was and am to an extent am a huge critic of love.

However… I have come to realize that I tend to hate romantic love and ultimately if I had to label it Hollywood love. The love we are bombard with in movies and books. The imperfectly perfect romantic relationship. Because no matter the red flags, girl always ends up with guy. Picture perfect messy love. A complete and utter false representation of love. But I did fall for it. At least for a while.

I do also slightly blame my parents a bit for this. I mean come on high school sweethearts who got pregnant and made it work. Mum’s family the picture of support and love. Dad’s family, distant and messy. But hey family is family. And love will fix that.

Yeah, it took me a good 15 years to realize that not everyone gets that ending. And that no matter how much I believed I was a long lost princess, there was no knight coming to kiss me. I ate up every Disney movie, and swooned when the princess was carried away. Or gifted an entire flippen library! I mean come on. How was a high school guy suppose to compete?

I was also highly Christian at this time and… well I tried not to think about the girls I had crushes on. (Now I don’t stop) I mean I was probably just jealous of them… right? That’s what I was told over and over again by the church. Not to mention the whole confusing mess of unconditional love. But that’s a whole can of worms i don’t really want to open. I’d rather focus on this idea of romantic love. And how eventually, I came to realize that there is a lot more types of love than what they sell you in the movies.

I’ve briefly mentioned my childhood, and my dreams of being a Disney princess. And well adorable at times, the ideas we have as children are often shattered. Kind of like that mirror I was talking about earlier. When your only examples of love are from story books and what your parents have, it makes the next level of love a challenge. And well there are tons of movies on teenage girls and their messy love stories. Reality is a real bee with an itch.

The horrors of high school crushes are endless torture. Which is probably why we call them crushes… they tend to hurt when they come to an end. Some of them fade away. But in my case I had an unlucky streak of crushes. Especially when I was a teenager. I could write a book of my experiences but there are two in particular that come to mind. And honestly the two that really made me crumble and deny love.

The first was a red haired jock. We went to camp together one summer and welp I was pretty smitten. How lucky was I when we ended up in the same homeroom class. I gave him a piece of gum every single day that year. It was your typical 13 year old crush. And yeah anyone would be able to tell that I was crushing hard. At the time, I blamed my best friend for asking him if he liked me back. I realize now I would have been bullied regardless. He was a jock and I was a nerdy, more develped loser. If it were a movie we would have been a match made in heaven. Instead, with the introduction of Facebook he and his friends posted a fake love letter to him from me. I was bullied relentlessly and was told by the school councilor that sometimes boys do mean things when they don’t know how to show emotions… oh and that I was asking for attention anyways. At 13 I was cyber bullied and bullied in the hallways relentlessly. And it went on for three years before they gave up. And they only stopped making fun of me because I actually got my first boyfriend at 16. I also didn’t tell them when I broke up with said boyfriend.

But the worst part of that crush was that I was told it was my fault. It was my fault that I was bullied so much. And when it led me to self harm… it was again my fault. I was labelled an attention whore and a loser. I lost so many friends because I liked a guy. I haven’t even hit love yet. But like might as well be love when you are 13.

I took away two things about love that year. The first, never ever tell anyone. Not even your best friend. And because I was one of the losers, my chances of love were zero. But like any teenager. I listened to the wise words of many women before me. One day, the right one will come along.

I’m going to spoil it right here, but I don’t believe in the so called right one… and I really don’t think one person should be responsible for another persons every need. That’s another unhealthy expectation society places on this whole true love nonsense.

But before we get there. Let’s get to example number two. Which happened when I was 17.

I have always. And I mean always had crushes on people who were older than me. With a handful of exceptions, most of the people I have liked have been about 4-6 years older than me. So pretty normal. Now if you are uncomfortable with age gaps, I need you to turn away now…. Because I am about to tell you about the first crush I had on someone who was much much older than I. And yes I said first. I have a tendency to find myself attracted to people 10-20 years older than myself on occasion. More frequently now that I am an adult myself. When I was 17. I too refused this crush and hated my entire being for it. So I did the next thing. Turned them into a father figure, a mentor, because hey he was already my teacher. (If your reading this, old mentor teacher of mine…. Please read the next paragraph. Okay! It’s not society’s version of love. I promise)

When I was 17. I fell in love with my English teacher. And this one was the reason I got so damn confused. Because I didn’t realize that the love I was feeling wasn’t sexual. I’d argue maybe romantical, but I’m not sure on that either. I never wanted to be taken out on a date. I mean as an adult I’d go to coffee with him now. But I also go to coffee with all of my friends. Coffee is the universal, let’s catch up. But I’m changing the subject. Because this love still hurts me. I let myself let go and ultimately I don’t have contact with him anymore. I see the occasional update but I let go, because I though that’s what you did when you grow up. But the truth of it was; the love I felt was something completely unknown to me. I wanted to be in this persons presence. I wanted to get to know their brain. This was the first person that I just wanted to interact with at all costs. I’d walk loops around the hallways in the morning before class, just to say good morning. When I picked out my locker I chose one right outside his class. And I wanted him to applaud my work. This was one of the few teachers that I actually wanted to praise me and tell me how smart I was. I’m still not entirely sure what type of love this is. I’ve had it with some other professors in my university career. And I’ve never been able to desrcibe it right. Any time I’ve tried, I was made fun of.

One of the girls I went to school with had a vendetta against me. And she latched on to this insistence of my love for our English teacher. Telling me I was gross, blowing it up and ultimately calling me out as his favorite any change she got. It didn’t matter that she was much better at all the sciences than I was. I wasn’t allowed to be our English teachers favorite and anytime I brought him up she made a point of teasing me. Trying to deny it ultimately gave her ammunition. I wonder what she would have done if I had just accepted it.

This love hurt. It hurt because when I was first going through my panic attacks. He offered a hand. He talked me through a lot of tough feelings, pushed me to try councillong again, and created a safe place at the school for me. I spend a lot of time in his classroom because it was the only place I felt safe at that school. So when I failed at counciling and had panic attacks. I got afraid that I’d let him down. He’d given me help and I couldn’t seem to get the right answer to my problem. I tried to hide myself because I was afraid of a stupid girls opinion of me being right. And I told myself I was such a burden on him. Because he wasn’t a councilor and there was so much he couldn’t do. It became a love that hurt because I couldn’t let myself go to him when I need help. And I use to dissociate all the time and make up senerios where he would find me and save me from my brain. Because he was the first person who reached out when I felt like no one could see I was drowning.

And I was shamed for it. I was shamed for loving this man. Because in this society… love can only mean one thing. True we give love to our families. But when someone says they love another person outside of their family, it has to be romantic. And it’s the biggest lie humanity has ever created. This lie was the reason I hated love. Even when I was in relationships I hated love. It freaked me out. It still kind of does.

But, I’ve learned and am still learning that there is so much more to love. Thousands of possibilities and I don’t think any one love is the same. We can group it into categories. But I’m beginning to think that it’s never truly the same in any relationship. And I think that’s the real beauty of love. We are so consumed with the perfect one and only true love. And yet some of the most beautiful types of love in my life aren’t romance or sex. It’s me learning to love my body and taking time every Sunday to have a bath and pamper it. It’s my friend giving me forehead kisses when I’m sad. It’s my mum calling me on her way home from work and my dad staying up till 3 in the morning with me when I visit with him. It’s the look in my cats eyes when she sits on my lap. And it’s in every relationship I create and foster.

Love is so much more than what we make it out to be. And well I still hate the word. Over time I’ve found myself falling back in love with love. But it’s unconventional. It’s accepting. And it’s never just for one person.