What's Love Got to Do with It?

Over the last several years, I have formed a kind of mental repository for debunked pop cultural wisdom, John Lennon to John Hughes and beyond. I try to seal these emotional red herrings away, but they have always had a way of seeping out in the form of insidious and unrealistic expectations.

Good rules of thumb: though as a sophomore you may nurse a debilitating crush on a dreamy senior, it is unlikely that you will end up sitting cross-legged with him on a glass tabletop on either side of a birthday cake. Neither you, nor probably anyone, will ever be as cool as or pull off “Twist and Shout” quite like Ferris Bueller. No resolutions, confrontations, or massively coordinated dance numbers will happen at prom. A band nerd without glasses is likely a half-blind band nerd, not Taylor Swift. In reality, even if someone did try to chase you through an airport to confess everlasting love, TSA would probably tackle that someone before he or she cleared the first couple of gates. Getting the guy (or girl) is hard, yes, but being with him (or her) in real life, doing the work of an adult relationship, is much harder; happily ever after is never, ever guaranteed.

And, unfortunately, love is not all you need.

After my breakup, I experienced brief, passionate, and irrational bursts of anger at John Lennon for propagating such unconscionable tripe. I ignored in those moments that he was only participating in the grand tradition of “love conquers all,” because I found it much more convenient to have one Beatle upon whom to focus my wrath.

The unconscionable tripe, of course, is not the idea that love is all you need, but that love is all you need.

(Also, “unconscionable tripe” may be a bit strong, but it was a painful couple of weeks.)

It was an odd and wonderful experience to be, for the first time in my life, in a real relationship in the real world. I didn’t write him: he came fully formed, ready to screw up in ways I would never have planned and take my breath away in ways I would never have imagined. As a result, and also as a consequence of getting older and wiser (hopefully in equal measure), I began to think about our relationship less in terms of a movie and more in terms of our actual lives: two people in love, trying to make it work. I began to notice delineations in my head, marking out what I knew was fantasy from good, solid emotions, on which I could reasonably act.

The perfect example is my go-to theory about weddings vs. marriage. Yes, I want a wedding. I would like to wear an enormous white dress, attend a smashing party, and be the center of attention for a full calendar day. Shoot, I’d do that tomorrow if given the opportunity. However, I do not want to be married tomorrow. Not by a long shot. I am by no means prepared to join my life with another person’s until death do us part—the very thought makes me a little green around the gills. Which, I think, makes perfect sense: deciding to get married is a two person job. Deciding, on your own, that you would like to be married strikes me as missing the whole point. Marriage is a thoughtful, thorough agreement and promise between two people—at least, that’s what I’m hoping.

To recap:

Wedding: yes. Marriage: no (or, not for a good long while yet).

I never mentioned this theory to my ex, since I thought (accurately) that he might miss the subtleties of my differentiations as his pupils dilated and fight-or-flight kicked in at the mention of “wedding.” In the talk that may have been the beginning of the end of our relationship, he told me that he thought I was hearing wedding bells. I repressed the urge to kick him. I also repressed the urge to tell him that of course I was hearing wedding bells—but that was in no way related to my wanting to marry him any time in the foreseeable future, because I didn’t.

(Again with those pesky subtleties.)

He told me then that he wanted to think about our relationship six months into the future—no further. I was willing to agree to that, since it made sense for us at the time. However, as I started to think about graduate school and my own two year plan, I felt uncomfortably lopsided: I could plan everything else, but there was an enormous STOP sign right there in the path of my relationship. He had told me, in the same conversation in which he outlined the six month rule, that he didn’t want me to make any sacrifices for him. On the one hand, that’s fine, and I can appreciate that as someone whose mother has made many sacrifices for my father. On the other hand, I began to realize, just as I found the distance between wedding and marriage, there is a distance between sacrifice and compromise; between laying yourself down on some metaphorical (or not) altar, and realizing that in order to be together in the long run, sometimes you have to choose something that wouldn’t be your first choice if you were in it alone.

Increasingly I found myself on one side with my new set of subtleties, facing him on the other side with his hard and fast rules.

I find it ill-advised to marry for the sake of being married. I find it heart-breaking when the person you love refuses to budge on things he decided before you came along. And I find that in reality, love is not all you need. You need to be flexible. You need to be mindful of subtleties—of the distances between broad generalizations (that all women want to get married, that all men are commitment phobes, etc.) and the actual individual with whom you’re building something.

Even if it started like a movie, and for a long time was the most wonderful reality, you need to be able to see what something has become and will become.

And if it isn’t all you need—the love and all the rest—you need to be able to walk away.

Eat Two Pints, and Call Me in the Morning

About a year ago, my oldest sister was having a hard time. We don’t always get along; I think the trouble started when she left for college. That was—oh, give or take—eighteen years ago. Still, I love her enormously and fiercely. In a way, how crazy we drive each other is not in conflict with how much we love each other; it’s actually indicative of how much we love each other.

Nevertheless, JR and I have the unfortunate habit of hurting each other when we’re mostly trying to help. As a result, when I understood from our mother that her life was getting jostled around in a most distressing manner, I found myself a little stuck. On the one hand, I wanted to call her and tell her how much I loved her, and how sorry I was that things had taken a turn towards sucking. On the other, I also knew that we give and receive comfort in very, very different ways, and the last thing I wanted to do was accidentally set off a small nuclear disaster on top of everything else.

The solution came to me in a remarkable flash of insight.

Say it in butter.

My signature cookie was once known as the Witch’s Hat, before I started tinkering with it. Now it is commonly referred to as the Peanut Butter Orgasm. (With all due modesty, I think the name change indicates a certain level of success in my tinkering.) I tend to make these monstrosities for birthdays, breakups, and the occasional well-timed seduction. They're my go-to, but in this case, I wanted to make something a little less common, a little more historical. I settled on our grandmother’s Coconut Oatmeal cookies, which start with two sticks of butter and only improve from there. I shipped them off in a converted Kleenex box, held together with duct tape, with a short note telling my sister how much I loved her, how sorry I was that things were hard, and how these cookies were the best way I knew how to communicate both of those things.

A week or so later, she emailed me to thank me. She told me that when her daughter asked for one of the “special cookies” as a treat in her lunch box, my sister had to physically brace herself for the blast of narcotic coconut smell as she opened the ziplock, because if she didn’t, she would fall upon them with abandon and have to explain to her daughter why there were none left.

Which was, more or less, exactly what I had intended.

This particular mechanism came full circle about two weeks ago, when I effectively raised the red flag, via text, to my closest friends in Boston:

Woman down. Send reinforcements.

I had broken up with my boyfriend.

Their response was immediate, and along the lines of, “We’re on our way five minutes ago.”

They circled the wagons, and they brought supplies.

Stine, whose exceptional timing and intuition brought her to my door about two minutes after I had finished needing an hour alone, folded herself up next to me on the couch. Abbie, when I went down to let her into my apartment building, started pulling out pints of Ben and Jerry’s from her purse before I had even opened the atrium door. Back in my apartment, Stine found the spoons in short order.

A little while later, after I had singlehandedly demolished the Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, one of them asked me what I wanted for dinner. I was still thinking somewhat disjointedly, and said absently, “I have two chicken breasts thawing… I should cook them before they go bad…” After all, I may be injured from heartbreak, but wasting food is downright insulting.

Abbie turned on my computer, searched briefly, and proceeded directly to the kitchen: a woman on a mission. From my kitchen, the occasional hollers would issue forth as I nursed my second (or third, but who's counting?) Manhattan.

“Are you particularly attached to this pepper?”

“Do you have… oh here… wait—why do you have two canisters of seasoned salt?”

“I’m so glad you buy your cream of mushroom soup in four packs—do you mind if it’s expired?”

As a matter of fact, I didn’t mind at all.

What emerged from my kitchen a short while later was comfort in a casserole dish: a cheese-encrusted, chicken, pasta, and cream of mushroom miracle of love. We ate it while watching Aladdin, and when eventually (and with some misgivings) they left for the evening, they made sure I had enough hugs and Sun Chips to get me through until morning.

Never will it cease to amaze me how the combination of excellent friends and cream of mushroom soup can truly soothe the soul.

It is possible, when we whip up casseroles and ship off batches of cookies, that we are, at a very instinctive level, trying to stultify the emotions with excessive caloric intake. In The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love, which is one of my favorite books of all time, there is chapter dedicated to this very notion, entitled: “What to Eat when Tragedy Strikes.” My friends and I did not originate the concept; we just honor it and perform it as needed.

There are plenty of times when I eat my emotions. My emotions last night manifested themselves in the impulsive purchase of a filet mignon—I find that I mourn better with red meat in my system. I would be the first to admit that my relationship with food is a little bit fraught, and I am working towards a place where I can combat distress without defaulting to a system of adding more steak or (more economically) adding more Goldfish crackers. However, when I shipped my sister cookies and when my friends brought forth ice cream and casserole, there was a bit more going on than the simple math of “if you consume more calories than you have emotions you might just feel better.”

The cookies I made my sister were our grandmother’s recipe. Our grandmother was, even for two people as different as her granddaughters, the ultimate source of safety and uncomplicated affection for both of us. I was sending her love the way Grandma used to express it, because I knew that kind of comfort would never get lost in translation.

Abbie made me casserole because she knew that I consider casserole (especially with cream of [anything] soup in it) to be the best incarnation of home any Corningware could ever contain. Stine made sure I had plenty of Sun Chips because those were the staple junk food treat of my childhood.

Don’t get me wrong: the food was great, and my emotions were sufficiently blunted. I’m smart enough to know, though, that the most comforting thing that happened that weekend was not the procurement of grieving supplies. It was the circling of the wagons, the rallying to the wounded party, and the fact that I really do have the most wonderful friends in the world.