It isn’t that I don’t fall in love.
I do. I fall fast and hard, hitting the pavement with a spectacular crash. I fall for friends, for people who don’t like me, for everyone I know I shouldn’t. I kiss someone who wants me for fun but not the long haul, I get blocked on Letterboxd, of all places, and I make a drunken mistake or seven because when I fall in love, it’s ruinous.
I love aggressively, all–consumingly, in motion. I love in moments that knock me over and hold me down. Frantic makeout sessions in the bathroom at a party, the music loud and my heart confused and angry. Boxed wine and an action movie and a “fuck it, why not?” response when I ask if I can lean over and kiss at four in the morning. Pressed up behind a cabin on the last day I’ll see her before she has to go back to her boyfriend, carving our initials into the wood. Two months in the Los Angeles dry heat, hair sticking to my neck as I wait for the A/C in the car to kick in, a hand on my thigh and a giggle in my ear. I love so much—especially when I know I’m not loved back, not the way that I want to be.
So it isn’t that I don’t fall in love. I spend a lot of time wishing that was the case, honestly; romantic love’s not done much for me. It has led me to grade school detention and two separate kisses on two separate barren New York streets at 14 and 15, my heart pounding, my head swimming, my cheeks wet from the other person’s tears. It has led to the girl I think I’ll always be in love with pouring White Claw on my head at a party in front of 60 people because she couldn’t face the fact that she loved me back.
But I’m not looking for love, not now, not ever. My flirtations with it are just that—a way to feel a thrill for a moment, to do something new. To brush against something electric that I know I’ll never take seriously. To have a bit of fun, nothing more, nothing less, no strings, no expectations.
It isn’t that I don’t fall in love, it’s just that I know that love and I aren’t destined for anything serious.
It wasn’t always this way. I wasn’t always certain with a bone–deep conviction that I am never getting married, never settling down. There was a time when I was younger where I dreamed not of white dresses and well–tailored tuxes—none of the fantasy, but of the concrete. What I knew to be real, what I saw from my parents and the best of love that the world around me had to offer.
Cinnamon tucked next to the coffee machine because she drinks it with a dash of the spice. Bits that never go stale, not even after 30 years. Kisses in the kitchen on a weeknight at 8 p.m., a glass of wine on the counter, Leonard Cohen in the air. Synagogue on Saturdays because it matters to him. Laughter, endless years of it, and a home that truly feels like one.
And I don’t know when it shifted, when my dreams changed from companionship to freedom. From comfort to the unknown. It was a gradual thing, I think, creeping and slow. It snuck in under the cracks in the door and followed me to Battery Park, put an arm around me as the wind whipped my hair and scarf some winter afternoon in high school, playing hooky with me. Shirking.
It’s a funny thing, not wanting love. Not rejecting it, not disliking it, just … not wanting it. Romance is a curio on an antique show: old, interesting, nice to look at, something I don’t really feel the need to pursue beyond finding it intriguing for a second or so.
I still fall in love; I still find myself stuck in it, from time to time, against my will and frustratingly captured. But this type of love, I think, is meant for other people. Appreciated best when it’s other people, when it’s from afar. This type of love, I know, is not for me.
(My mother, at least, has stopped crying when I tell her that I’m never getting married. So, there’s that.)
I have an abundance of love in my life. A couch I used to kiss someone on being where I lay my head in his lap, in pure platonic bliss, as we watch television together. Shared headphones. Late night texts. Cold calling and knowing she’ll always pick up. Twenty–seven Instagram reels received in the past half hour. My brother, asking me to help him pick out yearbook quotes; my parents, ribbing me for being single, so in love with each other that they find it hard to understand that single doesn’t mean alone for me, hasn’t since I grew up enough to realize that I don’t want a house and a wife and a white picket fence. I’m a city kid; I move too fast.
And that’s the best part about love, to me. The romantic kind that socks me in the jaw from time to time. Its movement, its transience. What I love about love is how it stays with me for a season, sits with me for a fall, then slips out the back door. It comes and it goes, and more often than not, it’s not with me. I like that. I’ve always preferred being a solo traveler.
It isn’t that I don’t fall in love, it’s just that I pick myself back up and take off running pretty quick.
