The Love We Take For Granted

On Stubborn Relationships

Sunset from a lookout point in my home neighborhood in Washington State.

The car window is cold on my forehead as I lean against it, corded earbuds in as the rain drips down the glass. I am a fifth-grader listening to a harrowing heartbreak ballad - Christina Perri’s Jar of Hearts or Taylor Swift’s Last Kiss or something else like that. I am pretending to endure romantic dissolution in my brain because all the heartbroken women in movies and music videos look so beautiful. And because I think romantic love is the toughest thing a girl can lose, likely because it is the most important thing a girl can have.

As many little girls do and did, I paint a fictional boy into all of my dreams, letting him take up more and more space until he is practically the entire thing. Among my middle school and high school friends, sleepovers are spent exchanging crushes, and text message threads become littered with boys’ names, sometimes concealed with a nickname or an asterisk for no real reason. At different paces, each one of my friends will be given her moment in the sun - her shining period of romantic reciprocity, when her crush likes her back, or when she chooses to like a boy who likes her. This juncture will be exciting and a bit odd - we had always dreamed about romance but had never expected what the material outcome of it might be. The problem of not having a boyfriend will soon become the problem of having a boyfriend, as my friends start declining my invitations and as we all try to uncomplicate these new messy feelings. Tangled as a knot in a necklace.

I would say that it’s funny to want something so bad that you don’t even know, but based on the movies you watch and the music you listen to and the real-life people you observe, it’s quite possible to feel like you know it. And thus want it. And then when you finally get it, you realize that it is beautiful and important; yet, not as soul-saving as you thought. True love doesn’t undo curses or save countries and lives as it does in two-dimensional animated worlds. Love is rather soul-crushing at times - it gives you something to lose, a new variable to add to one’s equation, a new pin to juggle. It makes you fiercely inebriated, judgment impaired and inhibition down. Lacking a sense of right and wrong, your compass needle always somehow wavers back to them. And yet, unlike drunkenness, it’s rather energizing, emboldening. Fills you with this sense that you could scale a mountain or drop everything and drive eight hours just because someone suggested it. Romance is both everything that matters in the world and just one piece of the puzzle.

One of the most astonishing things about love is that we chase and chase this one idea of it - romance - and then once we have it we realize that we more often than not always had it all along. I’ve heard many say that we need all kinds of love and relationships in our lives to feel full - familial, friendship, and romantic as if each is a vitamin we can take daily to maintain a robust social-emotional health bar. And yes, it’s true, life does most often feel fulfilling when we have relationships and acquaintances of varying levels of intimacy - bestowing us a sense of closeness that drives vulnerability and distance that gives an awareness of our minuscule presence in the greater world. 

Yet, I’ve found that these relational buckets aren’t as distinct as we often draw them up to be. As years have passed, I’ve learned that affection, desire, and heartbreak don’t just transpire via romance. Yearning doesn’t always look like pining for a boy, picking petals off flowers. Sometimes it looks like silent tears as you listen to your little sisters’ favorite songs, wishing one of them was falling asleep on your shoulder on a car ride home. Or telling a friend a secret and them taking your hand, somehow seeing you differently yet unchanged. Or your grandma walking you out to your car, waving at you as you drive away until she’s just a speck in your rearview mirror. Shared tears, hair tucked behind ears, surprise coffees, and cars filled with shrieks and laughs one second and silence the very next.

The traditions that I have with my sisters are simultaneously sacrosanct and boring. In the wintertime, we bundle up on the couch with popcorn and watch the Twilight Saga all the way through for the zillionth time. We walk around our neighborhood, hike up a hill and take the same picture of the same sunset we’ve seen every summer. We drive to the same ice cream spot and get the same flavors and walk one lap around the park before retiring to the car, sorbet dripping down our wrists. On the way home, we listen to the same songs and take an extra turn around the cul-de-sac so the track can finish as we pull into the garage. 

Now that I’m living far away from my family, I look back on these moments and feel a rush in my head, an aching in my chest, and pressure behind my eyes. Such seemingly mundane, sisterly things have since become so sacred. To think that I used to take an ice cream trip or a drive home for granted, that I used to view a shared sunset as something so guaranteed that it became routine. It now feels as foolish as any other kind of relational blunder.

Lately, it feels as though there’s an air of celebration across media regarding female friendships and relationships. For me, I feel like it has less to do with the intrinsic nature of being friends with a particular gender, and more to do with feeling a renewed appreciation for the people in our lives that are immovable fixtures: people who have cared for us and people who often rely on our care. The people to run to when romantic conquests lead to disappointment - who always offer their hands and shoulders and jokes and warm meals with judgment reserved regardless of how long it’s been. The people with whom ice cream trips and neighborhood walks are always promised. 

The consistency inherent in these types of relationships lends to our taking them for granted. Their immobile, and at times stubborn, nature offers us the comfortability and courage necessary when seeking out complications. Complexity is innocuous, it’s not as injurious as it may sound in the relational sense. I think we’re meant to tangle and tumble into people, we’re meant to connect in varying degrees and durations. That stubborn love is meant to ground us. But we needn’t forget that it is still love, despite its longstanding and dependable nature. If we should forget, we risk a different kind of heartbreak. Maybe one that’s not as immediately piercing, but certainly, one that aches just as wholly.

When I was a fifth grader listening to those heartbreak songs, cold glass against my forehead, I didn’t think that I would learn to associate that ache with being far away from the people who were in that very car with me at the time. But here I am. Every drop-off at the airport, every snack packed in my backpack for the flight back to New York, places a hairline fracture on my heart. The fissure heals and ruptures again as I count the days on the calendar. And then it heals again. 

How lucky I am to have so many people to miss so much, and to be missed in return? How fortunate am I to have those kinds of complications?

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One of my first articles for Cafe Hysteria was similarly about subtle acts of love in platonic relationships. Click here to read.