up, I was always hyper in- problems with this approach. I’d CONFESSIONS OF Growing dependent, while also being deeply use those magical moments as my It made me constantly entire sustenance, something to A DELUSIONAL romantic. oscillate between desperately want- pin my every hope and wish and ing to love and be loved, and know- feeling on. My love, in retrospect, GIRL ing, realistically, that I didn’t need was really always just obsession
by Rachel Loring
I
’m on a first date and texting updates to my friend from the toilet. First, the rundown: he’s cute, he paid for dinner AND drinks, he dresses good, we are now at a bar playing darts, I’m winning at said darts, he’s nice, and he also hates the healthcare system. I send my texts rapidly, filled with spelling errors and then go back out to the bar. It ended up being a good date. I enjoyed that when I told stories he’d throw his head back in laughter. I liked that he’s a Taurus, because that’s my moon sign and Andrew Garfield said that means we’re compatible. I like that he has a fancy sounding name. It was a good date, and if I were anyone but me, hopeless, perpetual, romantic me, it would have been a really good date. A great date even. Afterwards, I texted my friend a final summation of the evening. Me: Date was good, but I’m not in love with him Her: That’s probably a good thing
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love. It didn’t help that I read too many romance books in my formative years and boys never really liked me in middle and high school. Those two habits, those two conflicting traits, shaped my dating life into brief moments of intense, hopeless, painful romance and then long stretches of realism, the sobering up that usually took years. I was either 100% in love, deeply devoted or 100% single, entirely over romance, happy to “just work on myself” (the excuse all us twentysomethings use when we’re single and have no prospects).
But that habit is exacerbated by this: I tend to have really magical dating experiences. It’s weird for me not to be completely head over heels for someone after a first date. My dating experiences were like movies, filled with meet cutes and wacky adventures and dream boys with brown hair. Like once, when a date’s car got towed and we had to get a ride from a weird truck driver whose car was littered with bottles of pee. Or the night a different date and I crawled onto his roof and saw two shooting stars (he also may have played me guitar, and sorry to be a gender traitor but I love a man playing guitar at me). I can think of half a dozen other moments like these, calling my friends and saying, it was straight out of a movie I swear. It wasn’t until I graduated college and and totaled up the latest emotional damage from a doomed relationship when I saw fully the
THE POST GRAD GAZETTE, FEBRUARY 13, 2024
wearing a funny hat. I loved in the same way people who are drowning love water, which is to say entirely survivalist, desperate, and ultimately, not really love at all. I remember telling a friend how it felt when I was dating people, like I was turning myself inside out, with all my sensitive nerve endings on the outside and my thick skin uselessly trapped on the inside. “That sounds really unsustainable,” she said, “and really painful.” And she was right, for every magical movie moment, there was always the falling action. For every romantic montage there was a long, single-take shot of me sobbing on my bed or rotting on my couch for days. There were the embarrassing, overthinking texts, the desperate pleas for effort, attention, anything adjacent to love. The deep shame from continuously embarrassing myself, from never learning a lesson. And the worst part: coming to terms with the fact that magical moments didn’t equate intimacy, or actually promise anything at all.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I can pin my most significant relationships, heartbreaks, and delusions to major periods of insecurity, vulnerability, and confusion in my life. I tend to use love as a way to externalize and project my fears onto other people. Okay, that sounds crazy when I say it like that. Here’s what I mean: in my sophomore year of college I briefly dated a man who
