CRUSHES

Joy

It seems to me that the meaning of life is to treat everyone with kindness and to be as joyful as possible. I mean, it's either that or to buy a ton of yachts.

Certainly the only worthwhile or even bearable way to experience love and romance and [spits on the ground for fifteen minutes] DATING is joyfully. But due to the insane amount of cultural narratives and patriarchal power imbalance and beauty-myth bullshit that surround love, it can be VERY DIFFICULT to operate in this way. It's like trying to kiss your sweet crush while a cement mixer operated by Woody Allen is dumping raccoons on you. If you can manage to exist in the moment, this beautiful thing is happening (kissing), but it's insane to expect anyone could focus on that while society is telling us all these crazy stories about how love happens and giving one partner tons of structural power over the other, all while telling the partner with less power that they NEED to secure the affections of the one with more power. (In my analogy, this is all translates to raccoons methodically tangling your hair with the intelligence they use to open Pringles cans and unzip tents.) And in addition to all that, Woody Allen exists. (Your sweet crush is definitely NOT IN SUPPORT of Woody Allen, but he can't help mentioning how formative Annie Hall was for him.)

But what is life but fifteen to one hundred years of becoming cocooned in societal bullshit, followed by zero to eighty-five years of sloughing off that bullshit through reading, therapy, and sitting on the edge of a lake thinking about your life and choices? And when we've sat at that lake long enough and fully sloughed, we will be as we were when we were pure children, when we had never heard about thigh gaps and we could talk to animals and breathe underwater. So how exactly does that sloughing happen, that ridding ourselves of all the crusty scum that's covering up our ability to find joy?

For a while I thought this joy could be achieved by getting rid of all of my negativity about love. Maybe I'd use transcendental meditation techniques to recognize and dismiss any thoughts about whether it would make sense to put my Emmys next to my husband's Pulitzer before I had even kissed this aspiring novelist yet. (Also, I would be the one winning a Pulitzer — for playwriting — as well as two Nobels, for literature and peace.) Admittedly, I have never studied transcendental meditation, but I've researched enough celebrities who have vaguely described it in interviews that I feel like I get the general idea. I'd use this same technique when I started worrying if I'm too ugly to deserve love or when I acted obsessively. Or maybe I would stop all this not through meditation but just by being too beaten down by current events to think about anything else. I discovered that I don't have time to feel bad about myself when I'm so busy frantically texting friends about John Bolton and GETTING NO RESPONSES.

But just getting rid of negative thoughts isn't the same as being joyful. Being devoid of negativity is more like successfully "being chill," a relationship stage that inspires not spontaneous dancing and smiles but a lot of lying completely still on the couch next to but not looking at your phone. Certainly it is important to slough off all that fucked-up societal shit — it definitely stands in the way of joy — but creating a bullshit deficit does not necessarily mean that joy will rush in. There aren't many models of joyful, nonneurotic romance in pop culture that I can think of, I guess because it wouldn't be interesting enough to sustain a whole book or TV show or movie (maybe there's some indie British movie, but I don't have a streaming service powerful enough to find it). Without stories and examples to draw on, that mind-set isn't going to just magically percolate into our brains. So how do we go about finding the fantastic and lovely and fun side of romance that, theoretically, got us so obsessed with it in the first place?

Candidly — I don't know. I think probably it's down to some very Zen shit like living in each discrete moment as if your heart and brain spread out across the entire Earth and simultaneously were the smallest, densest atom in existence and every quark in that atom were LOVING this exact cup of coffee. Again, from what I've learned from reading all those celebrity interviews, this is probably mindfulness. I know that advice is so trite that it's maddening, like when the Women's Health magazine that showed up to my house every month even though I hadn't subscribed said that menstrual cramps could be solved by exercise. I GUESS that's scientifically true and obvious, but have you considered: I'd rather take an enormous knife and cut out my uterus than put on workout pants? But it seems that, unfortunately, the best way to find joy in romance is to always be alert to, to experience, and to expect joy in every aspect of your life. If you don't have a happy, healthy relationship template to follow, you have to stay present in the moment and essentially make it up for yourself as you go along. Extremely difficult, I know! The whole point of narratives is so we don't have to invent human behavior anew every generation. But remember: the Neanderthals did it, and they were a lot dumber than you!

The other reason that dating feels obligatory to me is that I want to make art about romance. I was raised by a mom who owned, like, four total VHS tapes, three of which were When Harry Met Sally ..., Sense and Sensibility, and You've Got Mail. (The fourth was ... Fly Away Home?) It is not exaggerating to say I have seen those movies a combined total of one hundred times, less than 10 percent of which was making guys watch them with me, as a flirt. Those movies are a part of who I am. They are the kind of art I like and the kind of art I want to make: art about people falling in love, and more specifically, art about Meg Ryan falling in love with men who don't deserve her.

But it's essential to not view romance as this obligatory, chore-like thing you have to "solve" to advance to the next level. Which is hard! There is definitely less societal pressure to get married now, since I no longer need a man to get a credit card and spend all my money on shoes that I saw Harry Styles wear. But there's still a lot of pressure to be partnered — not just to be married but even just to have some sort of partner to gossip to your coworkers about or take as a plus one to all manner of friends', family's, and rich acquaintances' weddings. I personally feel like a socially inept goblin for never having had a boyfriend. I feel like it screams out SHE IS BROKEN AND BAD. Which I know is not true. I am a goblin, sure, but only because I am small, mischievous, and greedy for gold and jewelry. But that pressure can build up until it becomes a frantic need to acquire a partner, any partner, and while some people would say that look is unattractive, I say: Who cares whether it's attractive. It's just not fun!

To feel joyful about love, you...