How I Experience Love

I’m feeling a bit experimental tonight, so I figured I would do something I don’t normally do on social media. This being a new platform with a different audience and all. So, I had this urge to talk about the way I experience love, because I often rate my trains of thought on how well they would do as an essay or article.

I’m no good at socializing. All the friends I’ve ever had were made in convenient situations, and I’ve never approached someone I didn’t know and made a friend out of them. Like, I want to feel grateful for all the friends I’ve made in my life, so I don’t like saying, “I have no friends,” but I often think that because I don’t have anyone I regularly see outside of work. I didn’t have anyone to see outside of school or, in high school, the library I hung out at afterwards. And I suck at keeping up with people. If you haven’t spoken to someone in a while, then it’s more awkward to reach out, and then the longer it goes on, the more awkward it is; not that I was ever good at starting up conversations of any kind.

Maybe a bit too much detail, but I say all that to give a clearer picture of how isolated I’ve made myself. And while I have a complicated view of how much the situation is my fault, because I can’t be the only problem in the world and at some point, I have to have some justifiable resentment about work friends never progressing beyond the “work” modifier, I do realize that a lot of it is a result of my own reluctance to approach others and let down my guard. Part of that relates to being a queer atheist nerd, making me feel like some kind of outsider in every situation I’ve ever been in and never a part of any group I actually belong to (especially since I didn’t confront my queerness for a long time, so I wasn’t sure why I assumed everyone would hate me if they knew me).

The other big part is that, regardless of how much of an outsider I feel like, all social situations hold the same level of difficulty for me. It’s always the same mixture of emotions, no matter who it is or what I’m trying to say or do. Asking someone if they like a movie I like is the same as asking someone to marry me, and everything is the way that I’ll find out if I’m going to die alone. That’s not just years of lonely hyperbole, either. In my ideal world, everyone would greet each other with a tongue kiss. I kinda really want to kiss everyone, all the time. I most want to be friends with people I most want to kiss. And everyone has so many good qualities that make you like them. I’ve never fully understood the difference between a friendship and a romantic relationship. In fiction, they hit all the same arcs and beats, and in real life…I’ve had one, and it mostly felt like that person was my closest friend at the time. Right now, I am mostly interested in dating because that’s the relationship where you get to kiss someone and it would guarantee me a friend. And I’m not saying “kiss” a lot because I’m *so pure* or anything; it’s just that in real life, sex only provides you with your own sensations, so it’s a weird out of body experience and not what I get from fantasy or watching porn, where I can imagine I’m as many of the participants as I want at a time. Nonbinary thing. I still want to have more sex, out of curiosity and fascination, but I have no idea how much real world sex holds an appeal for me. But kissing is the absolute best. Anything with mouths, pretty much.

My favorite story arc from Kiss and White Lily was volume 6’s attempt at a polyamorous relationship. It felt the most adventurous story, it was the least traditional relationship, and anything non-monogamous and healthy is a joy to read. It’s also fascinating to look at the different views of love the three characters—Amane, Ryou, and Nina—have. And fun, since they can all be summarized as “love is love.” For Nina, love is Love, the big monogamous fairy tale dream. Soul mates and never-ending, unconditional affection. That’s why she was the big struggle in the story, because as she developed these kinds of feelings for two people at once, she couldn’t handle it. For Ryou, love is love, in a similar way as Nina but lower case, because she recognizes that all love is equally valid and it’s ok to hold two or more torches at once. In fact, she thinks it’s only right to try. Amane, at the center of the story’s love triangle, thinks that love is love, a singular feeling we have for others that’s no different in any context. Love isn’t differentiated by kinds of affection or relationships for her, and she would probably expand her polyamorous trio to a few more people if she had the buy-in of her current partners.

I feel Amane the most out of that set. She really has her head on her shoulders and a kind of confidence I wish I had. I feel so much all the time for everyone, it’s hard to keep track or even register it at times. She, somehow, has the ability to pursue her love for everyone she’s interested in without fear, knowing that most of them won’t see her in the same light and they’ll be “just friends.” And honestly, what does that mean anyway? There is no one way to have a friend, no universal template for how friendships work. Everyone handles their friends as they come, according to their feelings for that friend and their past experience. Friendships are varied and fluid, the space where humans test the boundaries of their own emotions, identities, and desires. To me, friendship looks like an inherently queer relationship, or at least contains enough multitudes for a good part of the spectrum of it to be queer. The way society continuously hypes up the importance of having as many friends as possible and simultaneously dismisses the importance and fluidity of the relationship as “just friends” is really terrible, right? Probably largely due to patriarchal breeder nonsense relating to the enforcement of sexual and gender norms, so that people never fully explore friendships and find out things about themselves, others, and the world that would hamper hypermasculine norms. God forbid we get to confirm that a majority of humanity is queer to some degree and that truly cishet people are a minority. But like, I just don’t want to live in a world where when I read the final omake of Our Wonderful Days, I get insanely jealous of Nana and Minori for being the kinds of friends who can casually make out when they’re bored, you know? I want to make out with and grope my friends, too. I’m still not sure what my future looks like in terms of, well, most anything, but one thing I know I’d like it to include is at least two friends I can make out with regularly.

As I mentioned, I’m always worried that everyone hates me all the time. That’s despite the fact I rarely, if ever, consider what actual opinions any specific person has of me. And it doesn’t change what I want to do; it affects my behavior by turning me to “off” mode, because I only really have “on” or “off” and no in-between, but it doesn’t make me act like a different person or feign interests or whatever other tropes you can name. I really don’t care what anyone thinks of me, I’m just paralyzed with fear that they hate me. Not just because of years of repression. I really want as many people as possible to like me, because I have affection for so many of the people around me. I want my crushes to like me back, you know? I guess that’s where I got the axe I grind with monogamy. It feels limiting and sad, compared to the warm, wonderful life I want to live, being everyone’s make out friend and the person they can talk to about anything. I have something of that quality now, I’ve found; people tend to open up to me a lot without prodding and tell me things they wouldn’t tell most people. I’d like that to be my relationship with more people, more often, and for some of those conversations to lead into kissing. I feel like that’s not asking a lot.

Parties are overwhelming, and I get lost in groups too big at a time. I just want to spend time with people in different contexts and experience far more frequent physical contact and intimacy. Like, my dream is for someone to notice that I’m suffering and reach out, or for someone to call me up out of the blue to hang out. Neither things I’ve experienced before. Because I have a hard time letting my guard down, and because no one’s ever noticed that I’m not as fine alone as it looks, I can’t stop feeling this bubble around me. I don’t like it. I’m filled with so much affection that I short circuit, and I need to have an outlet for that. More than one. I just…it’s off-putting, isn’t it? It could be. I have no way of knowing if I’m at a point where I can start calling people cute and flirt with them all the time and be physically affectionate and stuff, especially with it being clear that I’m not looking for a monogamous romantic relationship. I don’t even have a way of knowing if it’s ok to tell someone how amazing Godzilla is, or why Kodama Naoko is such a genius, or how the modern superhero is a muzzled, institutionalized shade of their former self. Like, normal opinions about stuff I like, that it seems like most people aren’t into. Friendship is this wonderful, vast ocean, and I’m stuck on it with no map or compass, deathly afraid that I’ll be capsizing other vessels instead of picking up shipmates because I also don’t know semaphore, or whatever system sailors use to communicate with passing ships. That flashing light thing. Metaphors. I mean, I probably know more about reading semaphore and that light thing than I think. I need to trust my own instincts. Maybe if I do, I’ll find that I can communicate better than I think, too.

End