I am writing 100 How-To essays. It is a big project. Here is why I am doing it. This is essay 41 of 100.
There’s fourteen-year-old Sophie feeling lonely while Best Friend Joe was busy having a girlfriend. And there’s fourteen-year-old Sophie lamenting about V-Day. And there’s what happens when you tape a Sweet Heart candy into your diary and then leave it there for 21 years.
I am currently in the process of typing up all of my diaries from when I was in my teens. It’s for a project; I’m not, like, a huge a narcissist. OK, maybe a little bit of a huge narcissist, but I’m not being one for free. Anyway, my fourteen-year-old self wanted love so badly.
And not just any love. She wanted, specifically, a tall man who smelled like deodorant to put his arm around her basically all the time and let her sleep on his lap while they took frequent cross-country train trips together. I’m not making fun of my former self, exactly, because it’s simply a fact that I believed that adulthood would involve more mandated train travel for work, and more ribboned hats. Blame L.M. Montgomery.
This was what love was. At one point, fourteen-year-old Sophie wrote fan-fic in her diary about Rider Strong from “Boy Meets World," Jonny Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls, and Weird Al Yankovic fighting over their lust for her outside her bedroom window.
What I did not realize then — and to be fair, it was probably because I hadn’t gotten kissed yet — was that the deodorant smell and large lappedness and muscly train presence are not all they’re cracked up to be when it comes to love. Love is challenging and broad. And I didn’t realize how much of it I already had.
I loved my first kiss (it happened two and a half years after the fan-fic was written btw), and saw the fireworks, and blah blah blah. I’m happy that I had such a rich and fulfilling first romance, with its great extremes (We were waiting until we got married to have sex! Once I cut his name into my arm?!) and that sick, stormy feeling of totality. But that wasn’t love. I mean, I loved him — I actually still love him, and this was almost twenty years ago — but it wasn’t all the sexy broody kissy stuff that made the love real.
Love is the energy that makes you want someone else to be happy. To clarify: it’s not that you NEED the person to be happy, or that you won’t want to be around them if they AREN’T happy. It’s the knowledge that happiness feels good, and this person you know should get to feel that good feeling. So actually, fourteen-year-old Sophie loved both her parents, her sister, her best friend Joe Sackett, her other best friend Jessica Thompson, and also her swim coach, her acting partner, her best friends’ moms, and the cashier at Fred Meyer. And she wasted a lot of Valentine’s Days being listless and gazing out the window thinking that tall men had a monopoly over the whole market.
For the past year, I’ve been working on a project called “Love Without Sex” for Audible. I got to interview extraordinary people about, among other things, chosen family, asexuality, and romantic friendship. A few things are clearer to me than ever before:
You don’t need to kiss anyone or have sex with anyone or physically touch anyone to experience deep, profound, and life-affirming love.
Romance and sex are different things, and a lot of people who turn their noses up at the idea of sex with more than one partner are actively romantic with more than one person, whether or not they realize it.
The more love you have in your life, the more joy you have in your life, period.
Love is a renewable and infinite resource, and it weighs so much less than its counterpart.
Mostly, humans don’t know anything about anything, and we take comfort in the fact that we have each other. Even though we can’t protect one another from everything that’s terrible and awful, we have the capacity to find our people, and to stretch inside the warmth of community from time to time.
This is all extremely good news. It means that you don’t have to be proud of your body or happy with your job or accomplished in your personal goals to have love that is total and powerful and complete. You get to have love now! Today! Don’t be afraid — just take it! Like a jar of wrapped pillow mints at the front of a neighborhood Italian restaurant, that’s what it’s there for.
Over a year ago, I got married to a man in a park, which fourteen-year-old Sophie would have been jazzed about. In front of fifty people, we said our vows — which were about each other and about our community. Among the fifty people were my girlfriend of several years, my boyfriend of several years, and my best friends Joe and Jessica from earlier in this entry. Also there was chosen family. My lifelong love from college held hands with my girlfriend during the ceremony. My sister sat next to the woman to whom I dedicated my first book. My Chicago work wife had organized the whole reception, and sat nearby. And that was just on my side of the circle. Fourteen-year-old Sophie would be like, “Wait, what? Girlfriend? Boyfriend? SISTER?!” Just kidding. She knew she had a sister.
It’s hard for me to feel proud. That imposter syndrome thing — it’s the real deal! Mostly I sit around all day and selfishly stew in everything about me that is bad or wrong or failing or already failed. (And then I feel shame about stewing, and then I feel shame about the shame.) And it is scary to write what I am about to write publicly. That’s what makes it a big deal.
I feel proud of my relationships. I feel proud of my love. It takes work to show up and love people, and showing up to love people is where I have put all my energy for as long as I have been a grown up. Zero regrets on that front.
My point is: Valentine’s Day IS GREAT, and it is for everyone. If you wake up feeling surly, as fourteen-year-old Sophie did on February 14, 2000 (see diary entry above), I invite you to change your mind about what this holiday means. If you feel like no one loves you, go off and do some loving of your own. Tell someone you care about them. Bring a coworker a starfruit. Write a letter to a teacher whose lessons you still remember. All that stuff counts. And I do think that it would be hard to make the case that life was worth living without love. So if you need it, I hope you’ll take it.
