What it feels like to be in love
Vignettes #2
This is part of the Vignettes series, where each edition takes a big idea and then deconstructs and savors it through bite-sized literary morsels. The hope is to diverge from the central idea and converge back on that idea with an expanded palate. You can see the first issue of Vignettes here and all issues published so far here.
This issue is about the feeling of being in love and the many other feelings that being in love inspires.
1/6 Crying in the Car
The first time I saw someone fall in love was when I was sixteen. My best friend met a girl named Sofia he couldn’t stop talking about. She was perfectly polite, but she wouldn’t give him the time of day–romantically, anyway–for months.
Eventually, we ran into her at a pool party hosted by a girl whose parents were out of town. He tried to get her attention but couldn’t. We went to leave around 11:00 pm and he still hadn’t worked up the courage to profess his undying love. We sat in my 1982 Cadillac and he buckled his seatbelt and heaved a sigh of defeat, then said something like, “fuck this” and tore off the seatbelt and ran inside. We were not going to make curfew and I was pissed. He was gone for fifteen or so minutes. The only people inside besides him were the girl who lived there and her friends.
When he came outside, he did so slowly. When he got to the car, he sat down with tears on his face. Then he started heaving and sobbing, “she kissed me!” he said.
They were happy tears, for sure.
This was twenty years ago, and it didn’t work out between them, but that was such a profound and unexpected experience I’ve never forgotten it.
2/6 “If they knew how to, they would.”
Against my better judgment, I recently started spending a lot of time on TikTok. There’s a popular saying on there called “if they wanted to, they would.” It’s a saying (mostly but not entirely directed at men by women) about how you should expect more from your partners.
After a woman shares a story of her terrible current or ex boyfriend or husband, the chorus of comments chimes in with, “if they wanted to”–impress you, be there for you, treat you a certain way, etc.–then, “they would.” It never sat very well with me but I couldn’t figure out why. I only halfway agreed.
But recently I saw a comment that illuminated it for me. It said something like, “I think a better phrase with this would be, ‘if they knew how to, they would.’ There is some responsibility to educate people about how you want to be treated. Sometimes they just don’t know.”
I was reminded of a party my wife and I went to when we had been dating for about two months. She made a subtle joke at my expense to a friend when I was standing there. Nothing too vicious. On the way home in the car, I told her, “when you made that joke, it made me feel a little disrespected. When we had talked about the thing you were joking about, it was a very serious compromise we had made. I felt that it was clear it was something we wouldn’t joke about. I did not like it.” I was so accustomed to arguments and not being heard in past relationships, that my right hand was gripping my seatbelt anticipating a conflict.
Her eyes went wide and she turned to me and said, “wow, you’re totally right. I didn’t think how that might have made you feel. I’m sorry. I won’t make that type of joke again.” I had to play it cool to not get effusively happy and lovey-dovey over a straightforward adult, reasonable response. She didn’t just respond in a great way but taught me how to respond in a great way in future back-and-forths. She taught me so much about emotional maturity, communication, and grace with one simple act of listening and apologizing. Once she knew how to, she did.
Learning this multifaceted lesson from someone I was in love with made it easier to practice, and “if they knew how to, they would” has become a mantra I try to live in all of my close relationships.
Below this line, each vignette has a link that might take you to other stuff like videos or essays. Just in case you get so engrossed in one of those links, if you enjoyed this so far, please take the time to “heart” it, forward it to a friend, or leave a comment about what being in love feels like to you.
3/6 Weirdly Peaceful Love
This is a great essay by Yehudis Milchtein where she writes about what it can feel like to be infatuated and in love with your partner in a more settled sort of way: where you no longer feel the need to explain what is going on–not just with other people, but with your partner.
“I remember the first time we met. I checked into my hostel and gave him a hug hello. We started walking to a nearby cafe. Halfway down the block, I stopped him and said, can we hug again? That wasn’t a good first hug. So we hugged again. He thought it was the weirdest thing in the world. He’s told me many times since then that was the moment he fell in love with me.”
I’m a big advocate of “doing the weirdest thing that feels right” when it comes to making decisions and being honest with yourself. But it’s also a great way to make yourself fully seen. Doing the weirdest thing that feels right in a relationship is being vulnerable and letting someone in, but once you let them in they can get closer.
My wife asked me on a date once what my dreams were. It was still pretty early in the relationship, and I was inclined to say one of my more respectable, serious goals or to say I’m not sure, but instead, I went for it and told her the truth: I want to be a novelist. I told her an idea for a book I was thinking about at the time. Her face changed and her eyes softened and she gripped both my hands. Every Christmas since then when I ask her what she wants she says, “write your first novel.”
She told me that was when she knew I was the one. And I think I started to know then, too. I had never felt seen in that way before.
4/6 A Boundary-Dissolving Love
“It was a boundary-dissolving love I felt while I was in Italy. One that felt like it was the right time finally to be a pair. Do you know that feeling? I saw him on FaceTime last week, and the next day I decided to sketch what I felt in music.”
So begins this amazing multimedia piece from writer and composer Jordan Ali. He writes about a trip to Italy. Being a trained composer, he writes a short musical piece to accompany the writing. There are music and movies where I can understand “being in love,” but art can rarely help me ‘feel’ that feeling.
Nine months ago when I first read this essay and listened to the accompanying composition, I was stunned at how effective it was at making me feel the feeling. It reminded me of holding my wife’s hand in a car for the first time. I highly recommend reading it and making sure to play the music at the top.
5/6 Some of the best love songs are about the downside of being in love.
When I was seventeen, I spent eight weeks in rural Panama as part of a “service trip” abroad. I had to take an anti-malarial medication that gave me vivid dreams. In Panama, I lived like the locals and ate rice and beans for every meal.
I loved it, but I missed a lot of things about home. There was a restaurant my family went to a couple of times a month my whole life called 59 Diner. As I was a seventeen-year-old, my favorite meal was Chicken Tenders with Chili Cheese Fries. I loved it, but back in Houston, I didn’t normally think about it when I wasn’t there.
About three weeks into the trip in Panama, I started having this vivid, recurring dream where I was at 59 Diner (or sometimes in a sunny meadow) eating Chicken Tenders with Chili Cheese Fries, and I would wake up at 3:00 or 4:00 am chewing on my fingers.
In Houston, I never realized the majesty of that red basket with wax paper filled with fried chicken and fried potatoes then covered in chili and cheese. Eating it was great, but not getting to eat it–having to miss it–was what really made me appreciate it.
In the same way, I think that some of the most beautiful, poignant songs about what it feels like to be in love are actually about the downsides of being in love: unrequited love, missed connections, or even being in love despite problems in the relationship. Here are four of my favorite songs that capture these feelings.
Pretty Wings by Maxwell
This R&B song is among the most beautiful songs I know—definitely in the top 5, and the singer Maxwell said it is about finding the right person at the wrong time.
Something in the Orange by Zach Bryan
This country song is about a relationship that doesn’t work out.
All Night by Beyonce
This pop R&B song is about a relationship where the love is strong enough to overcome infidelity and other relationship problems. My wife agreed that it was so beautiful that we made it our first dance song at our wedding (even though infidelity has never been an issue).
Fade Into You by Mazzy Star
This is a melancholy song about how deep love can feel, and how in that depth of feeling, things might not always feel good.
I made a playlist of these and 17 other songs that I think capture a full range of feelings about love. Check it out on YouTube here, and feel free to subscribe to that account as I will be releasing more videos there that pair with this blog. If you have a song that you think should be added (or removed, even?!), leave a comment below.
6/6 When you know, you know.
“Ooooh . . . she’s trying to test you dude.”
My eyebrows wrinkled and my head cocked to the side. I had shown him the text she sent me because I thought it was sassy and a little bit cute. I put my phone back in my pocket.
He doubled down. “Yeah dude, this is a test.”
My friend nodded at me knowingly. I looked up to him. He was two years older than me. I had first started taking his advice years ago when he had a job and I didn’t. I wanted to be a serious young man who was building a good life and was regularly dating serious young women who were building a good life. He helped me along to where he was.
I don’t remember now exactly what that text had said, but I remember pulling my phone out to re-read it again and being certain he was wrong.
My opinion of my friend was changing viscerally, beyond intellectual deliberation. I surveyed his well-meaning but smug face. The affection for him was still there, but I could feel the respect draining from my body. It started to make me a little angry. “No man, that’s not it.” I said.
His eyebrows raised, “How do you know? It’s pretty standard. You can’t just return her text.” He shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘I don’t make the rules, bro.’
I answered silently to myself, ‘I know because we love each other.’ After just a few weeks, I just knew. I looked at my friend. My grip on my phone softened, as did my shoulders and scowl. I thought back to all of his frustrating dates and the women he grew to resent. The podcasts and YouTube videos he had been sending with more frequency that I thought were odd and immature. My anger dissipated to pity. In the same way that I just knew, he just didn’t know. He was blocked in a way I may not be able to explain to him, and he had rationalized that block.
“That’s not it.” He went in explaining, dissecting, and logicking his way through anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and negotiating tactics, giving me all the reasons I shouldn’t text back right away or ‘give in’ and give her what she wants.
I smiled and a subtle exhale escaped my nose–as if to give the idea of a laugh. Then, I pulled out the phone to read the text again and typed a text back to her. “Yeah man that’s all interesting and sounds good, but, when you know, you know.”
This started as something silly but became a pretty big point of contention that he couldn’t drop. He felt correct and vindicated that I was not doing sexual politics correctly–that I was too naive about mind games. As a result, we grew apart over the years. He had completely misread what was going on. There were no games. We were in love. Like I said, I knew.
About four years after I returned that text, we got married. I still return her texts every time. And I still know.
I know what I want for Christmas now too! I love to read and you’ve become one of my favorite Substack authors, so I’m looking for more 😋
These are beautiful. I’m going to forward it to my 22 year old daughter so she can forward it to her friend so they both can know what knowing looks like.