How many loves do you get in a lifetime?
According to my therapist, I’m yet to find out.
Well, isn’t that the million-dollar question? I think it depends on what kind of love we’re talking about. There’s romantic love: hard to find, hard to keep. There’s platonic love: extremely fulfilling, grossly underrated. Familial love: frustrating, often dysfunctional.
It also depends on who you’re asking. If you ask the World War Two veteran who scribbled letters to his beloved from the muddy trenches of the front lines, he’d probably say one.
If you asked the 25-year-old ‘Creative’ you matched with on Hinge, they’d probably say something obnoxious and evasive like, “I just don’t think humans are meant to be monogamous, man,” and proceed to ask you your body count.
If we’re talking about love in the broadest sense, we’ll surely experience a hundred different flavours of it in our lifetimes. Some short and sweet, some cloying, some sharp and seasonal that echo in your veins long after the line goes cold.
If we’re talking about romantic love, that’s a little trickier and stickier—at least it has been for me.
Default Setting: Performative Yearning
If you asked me how many loves I’ve had in my quarter of a century, I’d have to say one.
If we’re including imaginationships—intense, fictional relationships built on glimmers of bare-minimum behaviour from mediocre, barely eligible men—I could probably tally myself at a hard four.
My parents find the visceral and uncomfortable things I write about love and heartbreak unnerving.
“I just don’t understand how you can write these poems and stories and claim that you’re over it? That it doesn’t bother you?”
To which I will respond with an eye roll and: “I’m a triple water sign—please try to indulge my performative yearning.”
But that’s the sweet juxtaposition of it all. For me, the flood of words that fill the pages and bare my heartache in vivid detail are the proof that I am healed.
Writing about the things that broke my heart and how it felt isn’t enjoyable. It’s like vomiting up everything there is to feel about a situation until my mouth is dry, my stomach is empty, and I’m dry heaving on all fours—thoroughly exhausted but relieved to be rid of the bug.
It’s a ritual of expelling the poison from my body in the only way I know how: words, keyboard, paper, ink.
Lovesick Recovery 101
I’ve never been good at being sick. My mum always tells me I’m the worst patient ever.
I won’t stay in bed to recover—too fidgety—and I’ll hold the bile down until I nearly pass out from trying to stay in control. Gross, I know.
That’s the catch when it comes to Lovesick Recovery 101: to get better, you have to let go and hand the reins to your body, something I find incredibly hard but have accepted I must do to avoid the dire consequences of emotional suppression.
So, while I’m sure the things I write are uncomfortable to read (trust me, they’re uncomfortable to write), I won’t treat my body as a coffin for pain anymore.
I won’t smile and nod and grit my teeth through the emotions that claw their way up my throat. When it’s time for them to leave, I have to let them.
Maybe I’ll be damaged for a lifetime. A doll with a crooked limb, a watch that ticks anti-clockwise, a cushion with its stuffing leaking out.
But at least my heart will have space to exhale.
Every piece of the heartbreak chronicles that gets published is not a damning of my failed relationship or a character assassination; it’s a love letter to the woman who crawled out of the flames.
Matters of the Heart
“Was it really love?” my therapist asks me on an overcast Friday afternoon in February.
The question catches me off guard, and my face prickles with barely contained irritation.
These know-it-all therapists are always trying to make mountains out of molehills.
I take a deep breath, fold my hands in my lap, and allow a lazy smile to play on my lips—the picture of calm composure.
“Well, we were together for a decade. You don’t stay in a relationship for that long if you’re not in love, do you?” I quip.
My therapist says nothing, just pushes his glasses up his nose and presses his lips together in a sad grimace. He knows, and I know, that that’s not strictly true.
There are many reasons you might stay in a relationship that has been more labour than love for a long time. Children, ease, complacency, fear, finances, attachment.
The silence stretches between us, an invitation to explore the cracks in my statement.
Unluckily for my therapist, I don’t feel like playing ball.
Instead, I pick up my glass of water and take a long, slow sip before placing it back on the coffee table and leaning back in the chair to inspect my week-old manicure—an unfussy, milky white, almond-shaped biab, if you were wondering. This is my passive-aggressive way of making it clear that I won’t be conceding today.
“From what you’ve told me,” my therapist muses, “it sounds like infatuation,”
Rude.
“It sounds like co-dependence,”
Presumptuous.
“It sounds like companionship,”
Fair.
“It borders on obsession,”
Bit harsh.
“But it doesn’t sound like love.”
I pick at my nail beds and say nothing.
“Sometimes, when we enter relationships in our formative years, we can confuse ‘love’ with unhealthy attachment and rollercoaster dynamics that don’t reflect the real parameters of a successful relationship. Love, when you choose to give it another chance, will look entirely different to what you’ve experienced.”
Internally, I wince, but I stare back at him blankly, pasting a bored expression on my face. I hope it camouflages the pathetic ache of my heart that threatens to leak out onto the therapy room floor.
His gaze drops to my hands, and I realise that I’ve been picking my nails so aggressively throughout his stupid speech that they’ve started to bleed.
He plucks a few tissues from the Kleenex box on the shelf behind him, and I frown to stop the river of tears pooling in my eyes from soaking my cheeks.
“I’m afraid we’re at the end of today’s session, Shadé,” he says softly, closing his notebook and leaving me alone to clean up my mess.
Love is a Myth
I promise I’m not usually such an awful patient. Really, I’m usually quite cooperative.
I love talking about my feelings and hearing a trained professional pick through my trauma with a fine-toothed comb.
That particular session was just a bit of a bitch to get through.
It made me wonder: is there really, truly a collective definition of love that we can all agree on?
One woman’s love is another woman’s prison. Another woman’s companionship. Another woman’s peace. Another woman’s convenience. Another woman’s compassion. Another woman’s tragedy.
Love is a verb. Love is a choice. Love is a sacred thing that should be cherished at all costs. Love is the answer to world peace. Love is all around us.
There are so many perceptions of this elusive word (feeling? Activity? Antidote?), and I don’t think any of us will ever truly agree on a universal meaning.
Love, to me, can be a thing or a feeling or an action. It can be a person or an intense need to be near another person, or the warmth that lights up every cell in your body when you look at that person and you just know.
It can be Sundays spent lazing by a river, not talking, just being, sharing a box of ruby-red strawberries and listening to the hum of bees and the whispering of leaves.
It can be arguments that threaten to set the world on fire but end in forehead kisses and tangled limbs in sheets.
It can even be a maybe, a one day, a nearly, a what if?
Maybe the real question is: How many times can you revisit a love you don’t relate to anymore? One that once burned your fingers like a steaming mug of coffee but now tastes like the filmy dregs of an old cup of tea?
Or, how many times can you heal from a wound that has long scabbed over and faded into a scar? One that doesn’t sting or throb but marks your skin for life.
How many times can you pass love in the street and not recognise it?
How many loves can you lose without knowing they were there in the first place?
Or, better yet, how much can you write about a love that shaped you but, on closer inspection, makes you question whether you’ve ever really known love at all?
The answer, in my case, is until my fingers bleed.
So, how many loves do we get in a lifetime?
I’m screwed if I know, but call me if you ever find out.
Shadé x
Whoa. The entire piece is beautifully articulated. Thank you.💞