Love? Gulp. (The Student)

Taking up the baton from Mister Mischief, it’s The Student’s opportunity to turn her writing hand to the topic of LOVE, as part of our #LoveWeek on the blog

Miss Twenty-Nine xxx

Love is a pretty slippery concept.

We love to talk about love in all of these grand, hyperbolic, unifying but generic terms. We all know the tropes so well that we can throw the word love around as if we’re using it as a form of greeting; Hollywood makes billions every year out of our fascination with it.

The funny thing about love is that it’s a universal concept that is uniquely experienced.

We define it to no end, but it is indefinable.

We all come to it in a different way and we all love in a different way.

I’ve never been in love. But I spent a long time playing being in love. Regular readers might remember a post from the beginning of this year where I introduced the boyfriend of my teenage years, The Anchor.  We played at being in love for much of our three-and-a-half year relationship. Well, I can’t speak for him, but I know now that I definitely wasn’t in love. We said ‘I love you’ and did and said all the things that we thought people in love did and said. And we did it because it was nice. It made being a teenager slightly more bearable.  We didn’t yet know how to navigate the world so we did it together under the pretext of love.

But it wasn’t love.

Based on my relationship history, it may look to others that I know something about love. But I know nothing.

We play-acted being in love, based on what we’d seen in films and television. It was nice, but it wasn’t real.

In terms of real experiences of love most of my friends are well ahead of me.

I watch them ‘being in love’ and each of their relationships is totally different. They all express their love for their partner in different ways, and the ones who have been in love before speak of their current ‘love’ as somehow different to the one they previously experienced.

One friend said to me recently that her current ‘love’ for her boyfriend is more stable and comfortable than her previous extreme experience of it. She said that the ‘love’ she experiences with her current boyfriend is more grounded, whilst she loved her previous boyfriend with consuming intensity.

I’m still waiting for that first love so that I can understand that, let alone loving different people in different ways!!

I’m happy to wait because I want to fall in love. I want to experience love in my own unique way.

So I am happy being single.

If I’m not going to be with the right guy, I’m not going to be with anyone.

@TheStudent_30  xx