larger than the usual romantic love

I guess this is the second in a series of posts I’m going to call ‘Why I Write’ — sort of a follow-up to the one I wrote about redemption arcs and Steven Universe. This one’s about love and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Specifically it’s about a comment that an early reader (hi, Livali!) made on an early draft of Last Testament. ‘I love how you write attraction as something terrifying,’ they said, and my gut reaction was — well, isn’t it?

(For a sneak preview of Attraction Being Terrifying, by the way, you can witness me reading aloud from Last Testament’s opening scene at the West Hollywood Library! Thanks to Lambda Literary for the opportunity; it was my first major public reading and I had a great time.)

And I guess it’s not as terrifying as all that, to most people. Other people seem to manage the process of having crushes, or feeling attracted to a person, without the kind of standing-on-the-edge-of-a-skyscraper-rooftop terror I always seem to feel at the prospect. I have friends who are married; they seem okay. Insofar as I have a role model for relationship-having, it’s my aunt and uncle, who are staunchly practical and almost unimpeachably fearless — they each married their best friend and business partner, knowing they could communicate effectively and work together well.

Meanwhile, I’m out here experiencing an emotion I can best describe as existential vertigo whenever I find myself liking another person. There is no reasoning behind it, the way there’s no reasoning behind looking down from a great height and feeling your organs lurch sideways.

Maybe it’s a queer thing; those unhelpfully formative crushes on straight girls will do a number on anyone. Maybe it’s a mentally-ill thing; regulating emotions is both nightmare and necessity at the best of times, and all the more so when those emotions have a cause and a target. Maybe it’s just that sincerity is excruciating and the prospect of rejection is a uniquely awful threat. Frustrating as it is to concede, that quote about submitting to the mortifying ordeal of being known is inescapable for a reason.

In Last Testament, Ethel and Ama meet for the first time in an airport, and their mortifying ordeal immediately begins. Ethel’s first, horrified thought is — to paraphrase — oh no, she’s hot. It’s not a particularly happy realisation. Ethel is unconvinced that someone like Ama, who is smart and creative and driven, would ever voluntarily give them the time of day. Whatever happiness they feel at having found a friend and an ally is tempered, for a long time, by their conviction that they have to suppress their big inconvenient feelings in order to keep her around.

I met my first partner for the first time in an airport, too. I was twenty years old and I’d spent the past twelve hours or more in transit; I’d nearly fought with my dad at London Heathrow; I’d spent an eight-hour flight to Detroit in what I can only describe as an anxiety daze, then fumbled my way across the US border and waited out a connection delay, totally alone. Even before that, I’d spent months at a time worrying and waiting, packing and repacking, researching kissing on WikiHow (I profoundly wish I were joking). Reality felt larger and sharper and more visceral than I’d ever known it to feel before. I might as well have been walking through a story, following the action as it rose.

I’ve mellowed out a bit, in the years since — at least, I have mellowed enough that meeting someone I like is less likely to give me conniptions at fifty thousand feet. The basic anxiety remains. What if I’ve invested too much? What if I’ve misunderstood? What if I’m wrong?

The difficulty is that in their own right those worries are exhausting and off-putting. The title of this post is from Richard Siken, who, as usual, managed to nail me directly to the floor:

Dennis also gets it, horrifyingly enough.

“Actually you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.”

But it could just as easily have come from Dennis Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the show that took a genuinely appalling character and made me feel for him. Like every character in Sunny, Dennis is a wildly exaggerated presentation of human failings and bad behaviours; he’s a serial predator whose security in his own body oscillates wildly between zero and ‘I am a god,’ and whose childhood sexual trauma he is determined not to confront. His monstrosity cohabits with his vulnerability and trauma in a way that the show never makes it easy to evaluate; he’s both pitiable and cruel, at the mercy of his own damage even as he turns it outward onto others. He hurts your heart, but he’s terrible. No one, per Siken, will ever want to sleep with him.

Of course I worry that I’m too much. Why wouldn’t I? Doesn’t everyone? That’s what makes attraction and terror such easy bedfellows. Big feelings burst out in messy, unattractive ways; anxieties and self-loathings emerge with their teeth bared, ready to bite anyone who gets too close. That’s why I write about it. Not only is it a compelling source of conflict, it’s one that I feel very deeply, and one that I know I’m not alone in feeling.

Conflicts resolve, or they don’t. Either I get to write my way through the fear and into a hopeful ending, or I get to write my way into the fear, and put it into words for someone else to take heart in. A true story, in closing: this year, I misjudged someone’s feelings for me, and it sucked. But crucially, it did not and will not suck forever. Even if terror doesn’t resolve the way you hope, it will fade, given space enough and time. The world doesn’t end. The people need to know.