TO BE LOVED (WITHOUT A LOVER)
Meditations on aromantic romance, family, and the kinds of love we grow up with.
I am not: smaller than a breadbox; afraid of bugs anymore; quite sure of who I’d like to become. I am: tremendously lonely.
I care more to be loved, Jo says in the attic, in that gut-wrenching best scene of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women adaptation. You know the one––you cried in the movie theater for old heartache and boys like Timotheé Chalamet, too. Jo yearns fiercely for both independence and attachment; seeing this contradiction realized so plainly and without contempt took my breath away. What does it mean to be whole on one’s own but also seek the devotion of a partner, to ache for it? What does it mean to reject idealizing monogamy as a precondition of womanhood and yet feel that your life is meant to be shared? The lesson Marmie means to teach is that it’s more worthwhile to love than be loved, if you must choose between them. This holds water for Jo and for me: not in the sense that giving affection is more selfless than receiving it, but that the act of loving creates a subject rather than an object.
And yet. I want to be loved so badly. Despite the circles I’ve learned to write around it, I still hold it with me all the time—it still holds me. In the teeth of this thing, I pace from hour to hour and month to month, combing my life for signs of belovedness, belonging, care.
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I’m not exactly sure when my parents’ love, as I knew it, ended––would it be the first time my father stayed overnight on a friend’s couch instead of at home? Or the legal threshold, the day the papers were signed? Or, more delicately: when he came out to my brothers and I, eight, nine, and twelve years old each, baring to his children this longest-kept secret? With the division of dinners and weekends came new settings for our childhood: the one-bedroom on Ogden Ave with blue stairs out front, a Sinatra-themed Italian restaurant every other Friday night, the erratic little silver Saab of two years’ glory. Our parents, constructing stability for us in routines and traditions while, at forty, holding the pieces of newly undone lives. But we were kids who still wanted to pick out one family in the audience of our spring choral concerts instead of two parents on opposite ends of the room––it wasn’t clear to us then that this would work out for the better. It wasn’t clear to me that we were learning new ways to be a family, not leaving it behind. Later, there were the stiff, careful dinners where we met our parents’ respective suitors, men who bought us things and asked about school. My father figured it out first, and a tall, prematurely silver-haired composer became a quiet fixture of our Tuesday evenings.
In The Argonauts, writer Maggie Nelson describes the role of stepparent as one inevitably and structurally vulnerable to resentment. At eleven and twelve and even seventeen, I didn’t have her self-awareness: I hated all those strangers (the ones that made it that far) for sitting in my kitchen when I came downstairs in the morning and announcing the brokenness of my family with their presence. More than this, I hated their clumsy attempts at affection––I assumed they were cheap, disingenuous, my brothers and I merely obstacles to reaching our parents. In truth, we might have been. Those would-be stepfathers didn’t owe us parental devotion, and I certainly didn’t want them to try.
But after a few months of confinement this spring and remarkably surviving them together, or maybe just ten years of steady progress, I’ve learned to let the composer in. His is a subtle, persistent love: put your ear to the floorboards of all those Tuesday nights and you’ll hear it. He loves by letting me (forgetful, with a reputation for domestic mayhem) use his kitchen (sacrosanct) to bake banana bread; he loves by filling the basement with almond milk when I decide I might be dairy intolerant; he loves by getting the blessings of my brothers and I before asking our dad to marry him.
I still cried when I watched Little Women again last week, but not for the attic scene. This time, it was Mr. Laurence and Beth, and their loneliness, and the way they find what they need in one another, despite reticence and unconventionality. Now, I live with a family that is not my own, and see it in this house, too: a platonic romance that falls somewhere closer to filial than friendly, when I come home from work and the table is set with a place for me, even though I’m nobody’s kid or sister or girlfriend here. Something about these kinds of relationships moves me the most––maybe it’s that intimacy can be learned and chosen as often as it can be found, or that the hole in me doesn’t necessarily need to be significant-other-shaped. So, to Jo: we are loved; we might just have to accept the form it comes in.
AUTHOR: Emma Eaton is a rising sophomore on personal leave from Brown. Until her return, she’s studying rollerskating and how to take care of herself.
ARTIST: Sijia Wang