Hello everyone!!!!!
Today’s post isn’t in honour of a particular book or poem, but a feeling, an emotion we all (like to think we) know … L-O-V-E!!!! Valentines Day is upon us and that means, according to popular imagination, that you will either be up the Eiffel Tower with a bouquet of roses serenaded by a violinist on one knee, OR a sobbing mess sequestered beneath layers of duvet, shovelling ice cream and discounted chocolates down your gob. One of the main reasons I began writing, and specifically poetry, was to try and find the truth of love. It sounds horrendously cheesy like a fucking Richard Curtis rom-com, but it is a fact. I have always been beguiled as to what this emotion that everybody needs and wants, but can never define or explain really is.
And although Valentines Day is meant to be a celebration of that divine mystery, I think just as with most other sincere emotions/traditions, capitalist patriarchy has sucked out the life blood and made of love a travesty. For starters, Valentines never originated as an innocuous trading of fluffy pink things and shitty lingerie. IT STARTED AS A REBELLION MOTHER FUCKERSS!!!!! Yes, St Valentine got his head chopped off by the bastards in charge for the audacity of believing that people should have a right to dedicate themselves to one another if they were thus inclined. I’m not about to start halooing and yaying for the indoctrination of heterosexual Christian monogamy (ew.) into us all, but it is still important. Valentine’s Day did not start as a chance to brag about how rich and beloved and pretty you are. It started as a statement of intent: I can love without permission.
But today en masse it feels like this burning desire has been replaced with obligation and FOMO. Real love is powerful, and The Man doesn’t want us to believe it. LGBTQ+ people are being called sinful and aberrant for their love, whilst pornography constantly fetishizes their desires into a mockery for the mainstream. People are clinging to stay in or start toxic relationships just so that they can say they have a bae, pretending that forcing someone else to (pretend to) love them is a gratifying substitute for the real thing. Black girls are feeling like they don’t measure up to billboards of whiteness selling us pants and weekend breaks, force-feeding us the Imperial lie that only pale skin is worthy of attention and ‘protection’. Boys are made to feel like they can’t ask for love at all, locked up in macho cages. And little girls are made to feel like failures because they didn’t get the most cards in their class, being taught by stick insect Disney princesses or Love Island drones that the most defining sign of success for a woman is ‘love’.
To be loved, for beauty and selflessness. But the patriarchy has weaponized love, and it no longer actually means what it says on the tin. To be loved = men want to fuck you and for you to be grateful for everything they steal and exploit for themselves. And of course, womynx (womyxn= term including cis women, Trans women, queer people, feminine people, non-binary people e.t.c) are taught to give love like a handout, an infinite resource of patience and tenderness arising from no effort whatsoever. Love is infinite, but it does not come without effort. The emotional labour of which is, SHOCK HORROR, pushed on womyxn. To love= give all you have whilst simultaneously being a placid doormat, one of the bros.
I used to think ‘love’ was the only thing that I ever wanted, but as I age and see the haranguing cruelty of the patriarchy crush all things sincere and delicate; I have to admit that the version of love I thought I needed (old-school hand holding in the park, sharing sweets on the bus with a lover who will cherish me forever in sentimentalized photo albums and diaries- don’t judge me.) VS the ‘reality’ of what is inside each individual, is never going to calibrate with this hypocritical cess pit of ‘society’. So many ‘concepts’ I cannot wrap my head around.
Monogamy, and partnering in general is a myth of patriarchy to keep womyxn feeling like they aren’t enough if they aren’t ‘chosen’. Like womyxn need to complete themselves with a man who will ‘take care of them’, which really just means less women working and being bosses for themselves. NEWS FLASH: WOMYNX DON’T NEED MEN. WE NEVER HAVE. STOP RIDICULING SINGLE WOMYNX. STOP DEMONIZING PEOPLE WHO ARE HAPPIER ALONE. WOMYNX WANT LOVE. WE WANT HAPPINESS. WE WANT TO FUCK. WE DO NOT NEED MEN FOR THESE THINGS. WE TOLERATE MALE BULLSHIT TO TRY AND FIND DIAMONDS IN A SHIT STACK. I am glad I got that off my chest, because that is one of my main despairs at modern depictions and thoughts about love: that we need someone else. It is such bullshit, because as soon as you feel you need love, and that you’ve got to force and be desperate and do anything you can to be completed, then it isn’t love but fear.
What I’m saying isn’t anything new, feminist movements since the suffragettes and before have been saying that womynx need to stop relying on men, and I think it’s especially important when it comes to love. We do not need permission to feel beautiful, we do not have to feel ugly just because a man said it so. Men (lol NOT ALL MEN) are pretty stupid, we should not be following the same rules they have been trying to enforce. Their rules are leading to the 6th mass extinction of earth. We can do better than that, we can choose ourselves and start thinking of important things other than what men want their dates to dress like, or how to lose weight fast.
I know it may seem hypocritical, considering I myself have a boyfriend. But, actually he is one of the reasons why I am trying to be more astute in recognising the difference between needing and wanting love. He always tells me that I should never let a man break my heart, and that’s him included. Knowing that you can survive alone, and that anyone else is just a glorious bonus of extra colour to an already mystifying and divine existence, is a much more beneficial foundation for happiness than feeling that you will be nothing unless you force another creature to be tethered to you always. People like Chidera Eggerue ( AKA- The Slumflower), Audre Lorde (MY QUEER QUEEN) and Virginia Woolf (the way she cherishes the world and writes so exquisitely could not have been done had she been chasing a man incessantly) are much more eloquent on the importance of self-love before anything else much more than me. But I hope that this little snippet of thought has given a different perspective on one of the most tired and money-fuelled exploitations of love this western world has created.
If anything, I hope you all have a lovely day by yourself. I hope you romance yourself, take yourself on a date so that when you are encountered with amazing humans you can fully appreciate them without the clouded perspective of desperately searching for validation. Fuck the patriarchy, smoke a blunt and bask in the miniscule yet cosmic significance you hold on this fleeting planet, ignoring how pretty you may or may not be. Love without permission, from the state, or God, or family, or popular culture, or even yourself.
XOXOXXOXOXO