I met someone who made me buy pre-pitted dates. I’m usually one that likes things in their raw, untouched form. Anything that takes a bit of work, in my opinion, is worth working a bit for, ie. a lifelong friendship, body confidence, a sweet date (activity), or a sweet date (fruit). A sweet date has its own ritual: the ripeness, the fullness, followed by the careful attention it takes to open it up and savor what’s inside. It’s a ceremony, really, but in the back of my mind I’m reminded of the easier option, the pre-pitted kind. I could let someone else do the preening, and simply feast on their tender insides, but would I enjoy it nearly as much?
I feel the same about love. Love calls to me from every avenue of my life, and every crevice in my heart because I’m a romantic. I’m a lovergirl. I LOVE love, and I love experiencing it. But I know the second I find it again, I’ll toss my dreams aside in order to put it first. It’s funny because I know I didn’t invent this lovergirl heart. It was gifted to me, wrapped in pink fairy tales and silver linings that told me “your other half is out there, you just have to find it.” That, combined with sappy, tender K-dramas, societal rhetoric that taught girls to orbit around love, and a mother who was a lovergirl herself, meant I was destined to pine for it.
As girls, we were raised on fairytales and spoon-fed lies that tasted sweet but hurt our tummies. “You just need to find the right man.” “If he teases you, it means he likes you.” “Be alluring, but never too much.” So not to ‘blame society’--because I think that takes away from a woman’s ability to finally turn away from what’s been historically expected of her--but just to touch on it: We were taught to be walking billboards, ads for our own virginity and fertility; putting ourselves up for sale while tight-walking the line of being called cheap. To that I say, I’m taking myself off the love market.
And this is coming from someone who doesn’t resent men, despite how common that sentiment has become. I love men, not in a longing or pedestalizing way, but in an awareness of their place in the necessary oppositions of life: sadness and happiness, despair and joy, struggle and success, hate and love, men and women. I love men just as I love women, and I’ve decentered romantic love about as much as a self-proclaimed hopeful romantic possibly can.
With that being said, there are still gaps in the decentering. As I said before, I love love. I love the idea of growing old with someone, building a life with them, moving through the ordinary and the extraordinary side by side. I love having that one person to share the tiniest bits of your day with, and knowing it’s not a bother because they’re doing the same. And yes, through my decentering of romantic love, I’ve found pieces of that love in my friendships, but there are still certain things that only a lover can give--the tender kiss that barely brushes your lips, the subtle but strong magnetism that pulls your chest toward theirs, staring at them for as long as you please, admiring them, and them feeling safe enough to let you.
So to fill these gaps for my ever-wandering, forever-lusting, wistfully fluttering heart, I started a list. It began as a simple checklist of my tastes in a lover, but soon spun into something a bit more complex. My list went from “dark hair” and “artsy” to oddly specific quirks, like “has that little space between the base of their pointer and ring fingers” and “pits my dates for me”
My ever growing and ever changing list eventually unfurled and made me realize that the impossible vision of the lover from my list was just a way to keep me single. Anyone I held up to it would inevitably fail, and I would remain focused on centering myself in my own life.
Though the lovergirl in me still whispers that the right person will check every box.
Until then, I’ll keep pitting my dates instead of going on them. And when a potential lover makes the gaps feel a little too big to bear on my own, I’ll buy the pre-pitted ones.
xo,
A. Song