When I first laid my eyes on him, I felt weak at the knees. This is it, I thought, as I struggled to find the perfect words – not too eager, nor too mysterious, but something that would make him think about me before he went to bed that night.
I’m sure it won’t surprise you that I did not, in fact, find any words at all. Instead, I mumbled a hello and tried to distract from my vulnerability, by pouring all my attention into the sad excuse for an omelette I was making. I was hungover, and he was perfect. A modern love-story.
Because this had to be a love story. I’d been waiting almost a decade. In Year 2, a boy told me he liked me as we lined up for the canteen, a confession which followed with a freshly picked rose and a kiss on the cheek; and every experience I’d had with boys since then had been nothing but disappointing.
The first boy to tell me he loved me did so via text, and then said the same thing to another girl a week later. A different boy told me he liked me and then proceeded to punch my boobs in front of his friends because he thought we were “a thing”. My best friend’s boyfriend spiked my drink and forced himself on me at a house party, an experience that people are only recognising to be true now, 10 years later.
Laura Roscioli
But things changed that day, standing in a kitchen that wasn’t mine, failing at two things I’m usually good at – making breakfast and finding the right words. I felt a physical sensation that I’d been reading about for years and it stopped me in my tracks, just like the novels had told me it would. Could this be my first love?
I felt sick to my stomach. Frozen. Unable to speak. Suddenly very aware that I was wearing an ugly oversized jumper, last-night’s makeup and probably still smelt like tequila. These were the tell-tale signs, the symptoms of feeling “love at first sight”, and I had them all.
At the time, I was unaware of how unhealthy those symptoms were. As I reflect on them now, they read more like the moments preceding an anxiety attack (of which I’ve had my fair share). How then, could I have mistaken these signs as love?
We don’t need to look very far into the language around love to find the answer. The entire experience is described as “falling”, after all. We don’t leap into love, or dance into love – we fall in love. Falling is uncontrollable, and the results are often painful. And although it may serve as a valuable learning experience; falling is not something we choose to endure. Unless it’s in relation to love.
We’re taught that it’s not “true love”, unless it crushes you. I’ve never read a love story about the importance of companionship when it comes to romantic love. Or even of the benefits of falling. The falling that frees you from fear, the falling that allows you to be vulnerable, the falling that makes you see clearer, the falling you choose. People write about the lust, the forbidden, the confusing and the painful. They write about how much falling hurts, how it makes you blind, how it makes you swoon, how it changes the course of your life forever, how you’re not the same person after your fall into love.
Perhaps these love stories are the most intriguing because they’re the ones we’re still trying to unpack. Or perhaps they’re exciting because they’re unrealistic. Being “lovesick” is what we’re taught to yearn for, a love that you can’t deny because it totally controls you… which sounds a lot like a disease. Love-sick.
I guess that’s what I saw when I looked into his piercing blue eyes. From that moment, he consumed me. But I thought that’s what he was supposed to do. So, when I learned of his love for someone else, I didn’t question the pain that knowledge brought. When he wouldn’t commit to me but showed up at all the right moments, I counted my blessings that he showed up at all. When he told me that we weren’t going to be forever, I felt the urge to fight for him to stay, ignoring my gut instincts and my already broken heart.
Nothing about our love felt simple. Every text message, every touch, every time he turned up on my doorstep, it felt loaded, as though his actions were full of coded messages that I was left to decipher. And despite that every moment I wasn’t near him (and sometimes when I was), I felt unworthy, left in a grey area where I wasn’t chosen nor forgotten, I was convinced that this feeling of chaos and constant anxiety, was what being in love was meant to feel like.
I didn’t realise that the language around love I’d been consuming, had guided me to make choices that would render me powerless.
Because the language started to make sense. You can’t say that our love doesn’t sound like a good love song. No longer was I reading a romance novel about love and thinking “maybe one day”; because I was actually living it. I felt proud of myself. I’d fallen in love, I was madly in love, I was absolutely, 100 per cent, totally not myself, because I. Was. In. Love.
And that was all that mattered.
***
As a writer, writing about love, sex and relationships for POPSUGAR Australia, I do a lot of personal reflection. I’ve been reflecting about my “first love” story a lot. I feel a sort of responsibility, to myself and those who read my work, to properly understand my experiences with love, so that I can share them as they truly are.
I entered my first love entirely unprepared, and with no sense of self. I didn’t realise that the language around love I’d been consuming, had guided me to make choices that would render me powerless. I was doomed from the start.
Once I got over my first love and then, my first heartbreak, I wasn’t ready to fall in love for a while. It was almost six years before I met my partner today, with whom I share such a different kind of love, that I often find myself wondering if it’s normal for it to feel so nice. We’re not only lovers; we’re friends. With him it feels simple, comfortable, like I know where we’re going. I always thought that those things were boring, that they did not signify true love. That’s what the literature told me, after all.
But this is what true love looks like. It’s a hug at the end of a busy day. It’s a cup of tea in bed. It’s feeling comfortable to be your most embarrassing self. It’s knowing that they’ll be there when you get home. Love is not chaos. Love is warm. And simple. And comforting; like hopping into a bed of freshly washed sheets that smell like home.
That is the love that deserves to be written about. Let’s talk about that love.
