Category Archives: Love Letters and Other Related Things

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Misunderstanding “I Love You”

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There’s a show on MTV that I catch sometimes. It’s called Friendzone. I don’t know why I watch it when it’s on. It’s half an hour of grueling emotional heartbreak and I never follow it all the way through to the conclusion.

The show follows a new couple of people every episode. These people have best friends of the opposite sex and have always felt something more for said best friends. The show is formulaic. It starts with the protagonist asking their best friend/crush to help them get ready for a “blind date.” The best friend/crush helps out. They go to the location of the “blind date” and then the protagonist reveals his or her feelings for the best friend/crush. It’s grueling.

The show bothers me for a couple of reasons. First, out of all of the contestants from this whole genre of MTV dating-type shows, I feel like I can actually identify with these people. These people are my friends, my peers. These are the people I give advice to when they tell me they have feelings for another one of our friends. I know them.

Second, it makes the assumption that we have no control over love. Love, though, is not an adjective. Sometimes, it is a noun, yes. But most of the time, it is a verb. It’s something we do, not something that does us. The hopeless, star-crossed lovers are a fiction. And that’s not upsetting or cynical. It’s just true. Sometimes you like someone more than that person likes you, and that sucks, but there is no reason to believe that because your feelings are so strong, you and that person are supposed to be together.

Third, it presupposes the only way to show love for someone is romantically. There was a 13th-century Persian mystic poet known as Rumi. He was pretty cool. He was doing things that the romantics and the transcendentalists would do almost 600 years later. One of his greatest works, Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (or The Works of Shams of Tabriz), was written for his friend and master Shams. When you read the poetry contained in the work, you feel Rumi’s love for Shams. The idea that a love for a friend can be spiritual and transcendental, mystical and inexplicable is pretty cool. We don’t have to be having sex with a person or moving toward having sex with a person to be profoundly altered by another human being. I have a couple of close friends who are girls. And we routinely tell each other that we love each other. And it doesn’t mean that we want to sleep with each other. It means that we know each other, support each other, believe in one another.

So after a thirty-minute show on MTV, I am sad. I am sad because these people don’t know that romantic relationships aren’t the end-all be-all of all human relationships and development. It is just one facet of a very complicated awesome web of people.

Have you ever crushed on your best friend?

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As Relient K Says, We Should Get Jerseys

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When I was in the fifth grade, we had these teen mentors that came from the high school. I think their purpose was to get us all ready for junior high and the halfway high school things we would experience there like kissing and truth-or-dare sleepovers. They railed against peer pressure and taught us about character. I was totally into that sort of thing. I’m still into that sort of thing. I wish I had an adult mentor or something now.

Anyway, we had a boy and a girl. And I remember that our class was obsessed with the fictional idea that they were dating. We used to put questions in the anonymous question box about it. The girl would always answer. She would blush a whole lot and then talk about how great of friends they were, but no, they weren’t dating.

I’ve been thinking about that idea a lot because I am now a leader volunteering with middle school students. And I wonder if they have fictional ideas about my love life.

I think the tendency of kids to think a boy and girl team are dating actually tells us a lot about love in a really simple sort of way. In college, I see a lot of people thinking that love is having a warm body with which to cuddle, or having somebody to whom to complain, or having someone with whom to go on dates.

None of those conceptions really gets to the heart of the matter, though. The married couples I see as successful and the relationships that I admire are the ones that operate like a two-person team. Love is a beautiful, half-choreographed, half-improvised dance duet.

Children understand this. That’s why when they see a boy and a girl working efficiently together, they assume dating status. At some point we forget it, though. We get caught up in doing the same-old Electric Slide and never really think about the beauty of creating something new and original with another person.

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What It Means to Fall in Love a Dozen Times a Day

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Sometimes, I like to tell my friends that I fall in love at least a dozen times a day. I tend to get a lot of weird looks and people yelling at me when I say things like that. I obviously don’t mean that I daily go through the complicated process that might end in marriage or that I think the real falling in love thing requires no social interaction.

What I mean by it, then, is that I develop crushes like nobody’s business. Are you an artist? Then I probably have a crush on you. Are you a musician? Then I probably have a crush on you. Can you speak intelligently and convincingly about something? Then I probably have a crush on you. Are you driven? Then I probably have a crush on you. Are you passionate about something? Then I probably have a crush on you. Do you consistently love people in really big, awesome ways? Well, you get the idea…

Believe me, I understand how silly all of this is.

But, a crush is simply defined as an “usually temporary infatuation.” And this is what my crushes signify. It’s not that I believe I could spend the rest of my life with almost every woman I meet or even that I believe I could successfully navigate a relationship with them, it’s that there are things about almost every woman my age that I find temporarily infatuating.

And then I got to thinking. Right now, these “crushes” are really unproductive. I recognize them as “crushes.” Society tells me that crushes are important. I don’t want relationships with all crushes. I avoid until crush is over. Silly.

I figured out a way to make crushes really productive though: I recognize them as things about people that I really admire and like. I tell the person in question about her quality that I really admire and like and why I admire and like it. I spread good cheer. Awesome.

See, I do that last strategy with my male friends all the time, or I like to think that I do. I tell them that I love them and when they do something awesome, I tell them. But I’m all jittery about doing it with my female friends, mostly because I think when I recognize something cool in them, it means I’m crushing. It’s probably time to graduate junior high.

What types of things make you “crush”?