Yesterday, I posted a couple toots sharing some rather heated exchanges I had with anonymous blogger Unstory, who I previously failed to interview properly.

But don't worry, this was just a mere lover's spat you see, and I—

Hey, wait a minute. What did Unstory write to me in his most recent email?

"There is nothing better than what is it. You can't change anything. It has no meaning. Love is nonsense, it does not exist in a way that people romanticizing it. It's fake story. It's romanticized story about the business, necessity, needs. There is not one cell in your body that loves you. Water does not love you. You don't love anyone and nobody loves you. It's fairy tale like gods, heaven and seven-headed dragon."

Oh, this really explained everything for me.

On one hand, I really hope Unstory has just been fucking with me the entire time at this point, and is simply just playing the role of maximum cynic nihilist to get underneath my skin, and that I'm naïvely taking the bait (as I typically do).

Otherwise, if this is real, then it is heartbreaking. And I really mean that. I cannot imagine someone who views love this way.

We all ought to be born into a loving world, with a loving family. I know for many people, that is not reality, but there are usually still people in our life that give us love no matter what, right?

Even the pedantic, overzealous materialist who smugly explains that love is actually mere electrochemical reactions and biological hormones which have a primary purpose of reproduction is someone who still recognizes that love exists—that people have a connection to one another regardless of how or why that connection takes place. And that connection shows up in the body.

Researchers put spouses in an fMRI machine, threatened them with electric shocks, and watched their brains light up with fear until their partner took their hand. The threat response measurably dropped, and the happier the marriage, the bigger the drop. Harvard's 87-year Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of human life ever conducted, has tracked hundreds of men and their families since 1938 and keeps arriving at the same stubborn answer. The people who fared best were the ones who leaned into their relationships, and loneliness carries a health risk on par with smoking. Oxytocin—the hormone that spikes when a mother gazes at her newborn—rises in both a dog and its person when they lock eyes.

None of this is metaphor. It's a body responding to another body, a nervous system settling because another nervous system is near. Real, tangible, physical fact.

To place love in the same category as the abstract, unknowable God or Heaven or fantastical seven-headed dragon is to believe it does not exist at all, whatsoever.

If Unstory is not fucking with me, then the world has gravely failed him. Those who were meant to demonstrate and prove the existence of love to him at a young age failed him. And although we deeply disagree on many important things, I've become rather endeared to Unstory and enjoy him in a wayward way, and I do not know if I could make him capable of understanding the existence of love, let alone how important it is. I'll once again quote Paulo Freire:

“Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation.”
―Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I have felt love countless times in my life; the truth is, I fall in love so easily. And I try my best to practice unconditional love—a love that does not change or falter, regardless of how everything else does.

And I have witnessed true love countless times in my life. The love parents have for their children, the love good teachers have for their students, the love of deep and supportive friendships. Just to name a few. I've seen it in chosen family, the kinship of Queers built out of necessity when their biological families turned them away. Friends became kin—showing up at the hospital bed, cooking the meal, holding the vigil, doing every unglamorous act a parent is supposed to do. I've seen it in the ballroom houses of Harlem, where a mother and father with no blood tie to their children built families out of nothing but the decision to love someone. I've seen it in a mutual aid fridge stocked by neighbours who will never meet the people they feed. I've seen it in a grandmother's hands, in a dog waiting at the door for hours, in the volunteer who drives a stranger to chemo every week without being asked twice. Love is everywhere you bother to look for it.

I've written before about how romantic love seems impossible for many people in the present day, and I sympathize with that. Both love and sex are in decline for Generation Z adults.

A lack of love in your life, though, does not mean there's a lack of love in the entire world. I desperately hope that there is a turn of events, and the monumental, transcendental power of love finds Unstory and pierces the impossibly dense armour he wears, and shakes him to his core, and makes him question everything that came before, and shakes the dust. I wish this for everyone.

I know for me personally, I hate the idea of bothering others or making them uncomfortable, so I never approach somebody or proactively ask. All my previous relationships have been wonderful flukes, and they've all been people who I met in person. I can't imagine any of the many dating apps actually working.

All of this to say that I am, right now, looking for love. I am in a season of yearning! Dreams of an Internet boyfriend/girlfriend. And this post is an embarrassing declaration, as much as it is a genuine prayer. And I need to post this while I still have the courage to do so. How silly I am; how silly love is.

But all I want is the perfect love,
Though I know it's small, I want love for us all.
―Sufjan Stevens, "Impossible Soul"