real adulting is romancing

not soaking your heart in cynicism brine

As a young girl, a child even, I was all about romance and love stories. I was as lovergirl as any maiden. Generous and profuse in the way I poured love into life and others. I still am, it is my core essence.

Then there was a phase - inevitable in the coming of age seasons of our lives - where I stopped listening to love songs, stopped watching the romcoms and reading the novels. To some extent, I did the usual thing that men especially love to do - escaping the painful risk and initiation that heartbreak is by claiming that maybe true love isn’t even real, and... *insert a thousand empty intellectualisations that are simply excuses to avoid the bravery it takes to consent to fully, deeply swimming in the human experience*

I’m only now realising that the REAL adult thing to do is taking full responsibility for the opening of my heart, because no one else can, will or should on my behalf.

The real adult thing is to take responsibility in our own remaking, our own recreation, as many times as it takes, like working with clay. We’ll never get it done, nor right, in this lifetime, honestly, and I have a feeling like we’re only here to enjoy this like a creative process anyway. Over and over again, because what else is life if not midwifing our own rebirths and evolution, especially those brought in by lovers in different seasons, who enter our lives for fated reasons?

The real adult thing is to recognise how I create my life, through the stories I hold within and call “reality.”

The real adult thing, the brave thing, the tenacious thing, the unbelievably courageous thing, is to take responsibility for the quality of my life by taking responsibility for healing, softening and opening my heart, and realising my heart’s precious worth in being maintained, nourished and taken care of to continue to be soft, strong and open. One of the most beautiful things every Yin yoga sequence for the heart will teach you is how softness and strength go hand in hand when it comes to our heart, and they collectively amplify each other. It is softness that takes true strength, not a ceaseless armour.

The real adult thing is attuning myself to the love stories, the romance and the act of being an embodiment of love on earth anyway, instead of calibrating my belief system to a million reasons to stay brittle, bitter and rotting inside a hard, hurt shell. Instead of amplifying yet another mindless man-hating conversation. Ever since I stopped having those, my life has only gotten better and better, as have the men who walk into it.

I am realising now that the lovergirl in me wasn’t me being a child, it was my purest essence. I am especially realising that it wasn’t exactly “grown-up” to be stagnantly marinating in cynicism brine, protecting myself from “unrealistic” things like romance.

I realised that only a petulant child would sit there, bitter, languishing upon her ivory tower, waiting for someone to come in and convince her - against all her locked latches, against her every wrestle and tackle - that love is indeed real. Only a petulant child would sit there, dried up, closed off, arms closed, posture crouched, heart closed, refusing to allow love in - in an elaborate tantrum as expression of their wounding. Not an adult.

That kindness, softness, romance, care, they’re all real.

Like a lovely friend recently said to me, with all the sexy power quintessential to a Scorpio’s way with words, having an open heart is not for the weak.

I often wonder about why we only ever think that pain, darkness, grit and hardship are “realistic” or “real,” and this especially comes up for me in the way I see casual onlookers discuss art and media. Why is it only talked of as “real” when there’s a woman being assaulted, crimes being committed, or someone’s awfully poor and going thru the wringer?

Beauty is also real. A cat purring is also real. Having a laugh in the kitchen after a tough day is also real. Every sunrise and every new moon being a new beginning is also real.

Every playlist that heals you. Music, roses, rabbits, whispers, kisses, synchronicity, that exchange of a cheeky, knowing glance across a table, an inside joke, a perfectly ripe fruit, a moment of belonging, every magnificent textile ever handwoven for months on end. All real. That glow in your heart when you walk back home from meeting a friend, and all the problems of your life suddenly seem more like black spots on a windshield and less like black holes that will definitely consume you. That feeling when you see a message waiting for you from that one person and you just know this one likes you back. They’re all real too. Every moment in life when you’re feeling your heart slightly bursting with joy is as real as every misery humans have ever endured.

There is so much softness, love, nourishment, nurturing and goodness in this world that is just as real and ‘authentic’ (which feels to me like the weirdest word to use anymore, sometimes) as the suffering is.

erotic coping is feeling your joy just as intensely as you do your grief, instead of numbing one, which exiles both. -

Nairy Fstukh

Why don’t we think it’s real enough when we encounter joy? Synchronicity? Delicious anticipation? I used to sometimes find myself afraid of feeling too happy. Afraid of the immense bursting in my heart, the way I felt about my cats, my life, the people I’ve met, a lucky day. It felt terrifying to be too delighted, too excited, too joyous, too soaringly proud of having achieved something, because I felt like if I was ‘caught’ feeling too good, it would be snatched away from me. That I would pay, someday, when it leaves. That it’s not allowed.

The grit, the courage, the radical act of self-reverence is in being open to love again, and to keep our heart soft for ourselves more than anyone else - even in a world full of contrast and weirdos and being ghosted and people who seem to know no more about courtship than Liking your story (!?)

This finite life of mine deserves to be lived in the frequency of romance, beauty and love. It’s boring, tiring, draining, immature and just silly to try to train and therapize myself into “not needing anyone,” to feign nonchalance about romance and love as the ‘Grown Up, Cool’ thing to do.

Why do avoidants of all kinds - avoidantly attached people, avoiders of intimacy, avoiders of love - and especially the ones with the willingness to access only as much emotional depth and intensity within themselves as a rain puddle get to have everything they ever do labelled as the ‘right’ way to be? Don’t you ever get tired of being told to participate in an ‘idgaf war’ (as the kids call it) at every corner you turn?

It’s just so weak to be resigned to bitterness, cynicism and sweeping blanket statements that the entire world (or dating scene or population of men) is bad out there. It’s so boring. It’s so uninspiring. Maybe you need to go read some Anaïs Nin. Or at least some fiction. Maybe you need to sometimes have tiny containers of time where you simply live your life like it’s all ever unfolding poetry. No optimising. No strategies. No doing the five things the self development podcast said you should do.

I’m beginning to feel like the bravest, most grown up thing to do, the most “I choose my life’s unfolding, I create the trajectory of my reality instead of being a passive victim to life, my life happens for me and not to me” embodiment is to listen to all the Hindi love songs again, to finally read Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles and cry in bed about it, to strip off the exoskeletons of all these years and return to being someone who loves love. To watch the romantic happy endings, because they’re all very real. Love is real, and it’s everything, and I don’t need anybody to prove that to me, because I intend on being the very embodiment of love myself, first.

I love how from 20-26ish, so many of us women think we are sooo serious and grown up, and then we just get over it one day, as we mature. And then we finally exhale. We are filled and rounded out in more ways than one. We breathe all the way into our belly again. We overflow in flesh rolls and cinnamon buns for breakfast. We bring home flowers just because, we make things pink again, we let wonderful men make us blush again, we put our heart back on our sleeve, we draw, we giggle, we make playlists to take baths to. We finally let ourselves fucking bloom.

Reads to accompany this one:

Love Without Evidence

Love Is Worth Believing In

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