I Hate Love Stories

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Every time someone recommends me a book or a movie, I ask the same question. “Is it a love story?”

If they say yes, I quietly remove it from my list. People usually laugh. “So you don’t believe in love?”

No, I do believe in love. I think about it more than most people I know. Probably more than is useful. That’s the actual problem, I want it too badly to watch it get flattened into ninety minutes with a soundtrack cue telling me when to feel something.

For a long time I thought it was the lazy writing. The cute meet, the misunderstanding that could be solved with one honest sentence. Then I thought maybe it was just that I’d read too many of them, seen the shape before the story even started moving.

That wasn’t it either.

Here’s what it actually is. A love story shows up already cleaned. Somebody has gone through and swept the floor, put the furniture back, hung the pictures straight. You walk in and everything has a name. This was the beginning. This was the turn. This was the ending, and it knew it was the ending while it was happening.

I don’t think love has ever once told me it was ending while it was happening.

The love I actually know looks like a room after a storm. Everything is messy and not in place. In a real love story, somebody’s sentence just stops mid-air, and nobody ever finishes it, not that day, not in the years after. You keep loving someone you’re actively losing. You stay near someone the feeling already left. None of it organizes into chapters no matter how hard you try to make it, and I have tried.

And yet every film manages it. Every book. Love, made legible. That’s the part I can’t get past, I have never once met the actual feeling behaving that clearly. It doesn’t explain itself. It just moves in and rearranges you and leaves you to figure out later what happened.

I used to think it was love itself I found hard to believe on-screen. It isn’t. It’s the certainty wrapped around it. Two people who are certain. Certain they’re meant for each other, certain they’re not, certain this is forever, certain this is the last time they’ll speak. Nobody in my life has ever handed me that. Every person I’ve cared about has walked around with a question mark hovering somewhere above them that nobody, including them, could answer. Will you stay. Will I. Does this version of us make it to next spring. The story keeps going. No narrator steps in to close that loop for you.

That’s probably the real reason fiction doesn’t reach me the way it’s supposed to. It already knows its own ending. Mine never has.

Real love, the kind I’ve actually lived inside, spends years just introducing itself. It wears other clothes first. Shows up as friendship for a while. As obligation. As silence you don’t examine too closely. As the distance you tell yourself is temporary. Sometimes it only announces itself after the relationship’s already over, as understanding, years too late to do anything with.

Something else I’ve noticed: almost every love story is really a story about finding somebody. Almost none of them are about becoming a person who’s actually capable of loving one. That second thing is the story I want. Finding someone can happen by accident, on a train, in a doorway, doesn’t take any skill at all. But figuring out how to stop your own fear and ego and old wounds and quiet expectations from quietly murdering the good thing that takes an entire life. And it’s slow. It doesn’t announce itself with music.

Nobody claps when a person chooses to be patient instead of right. There’s no swelling score for the moment someone decides to say the true thing instead of vanishing. No one stands up in a theater because two people finally figured out how to apologize without also defending themselves in the same breath. Too ordinary to film. Ordinary enough to actually change somebody’s life, though.

So maybe that’s the real reason I keep walking out of these stories early. Not because they make love look impossible, they make it look finished. Like a place you arrive at and then just live, permanently furnished. I’ve never once believed that’s true.

Love, to me, is closer to a language I’ll never be fluent in. Nobody gets fluent. You just mispronounce it slightly better than you did last year, and then you die still mispronouncing it, and that’s not a tragedy, that’s just what the language is like.

Someday someone will write the version that doesn’t try to finish its own sentences. One that admits, flat out, that none of us understand this thing, we just keep translating it, badly, into whatever shape we happen to be that year.

I think that’s the only love story I’d actually sit through to the end.

Because it wouldn’t feel like fiction.

It would feel like meeting someone.