À Écrire Vers L'Amour (To Write Toward Love)

I am wondering about how, as we get older, we fall in love differently than when we do when we’re all new and green as babies freshly out into the world as a living, feeling people. I also have been thinking about how much I’ve changed as a writer who writes about love over the past 10 or so years. I write about a lot of things, but really it all goes back to love in one way or another. Experience changes love, yes. Maturity changes love, yes. I think also, for me, loving God and understanding how God loves adds a new, beautiful layer on top of how I see and feel love. Both love the noun and love the verb, living it and writing to, from, and about it. “To write toward something.” That was something I heard a lot last year. It’s quite beautiful. To write in motion, to write alive, to write with momentum.

Religiousness and piety as qualities of love (secularly) are things I used to write about; that is love that comes in the form of bodily and spiritual worship accompanied with pure, steadfast devotion. “Used to,” for reference lands us anywhere between 2018 to 2025, which, at that point in my life, I didn’t think of these things from a theological perspective as someone experiencing God, but I thought about them more from a secular perspective considering ritual, devotion, ingestion, and sacrifice as acts associated with religion, but holy separately and by themselves in the sense that whether it was, for example, devotion to God or devotion to a lover, it was sacred all the same. I think that as I developed as a person, I really latched onto the disgusting side of being human. And while that specifically bleeds into more areas of my life than just love, the connection that I made between worship and love was probably informed by me growing up in a church. I think, also, that the type of literature and music that I’m drawn to really colored that way of thinking; not in a negative kind of way, but I am the sum of all of the things I have read, seen, and experienced, and I’m drawn to things that reach for higher ways of expressing the human experience while doing so in linguistically and sentimentally violent, disgusting, sometimes disturbing ways. Undoubtedly, the works I have consumed have also played a role in that connection. Because of this, I aligned my experiences of love, longing, pain, and suffering that I, by nature, tended to feel on their more extreme ends as bearing the same qualities of a person wholly devoted to, suffering for, or experiencing fully religion, God, or art without actually being religious myself at the time. Describing those experiences as something more than worldly by pulling from religious metaphor, symbolism, and allegory has always been something that resonated with me.

When I said earlier the “disgusting side of being human,” I don’t necessarily mean disgusting in a bad way. I actually don’t mean it in a bad way at all which is going to be tricky for me to try and explain because I don’t know of a single connotative meaning for that word that does not mean bad. However, think of it like when you hear a really good song or when you see that Jason Williams pass that he threw off the elbow and you just gotta stop for a second and you’re like, “that’s fuckin nasty.” THAT’S what I’m meaning. It’s different because I’m talking about love, so it’s a little grittier than that, but I’m just trying to say that I guess, for me, the more disgusting something is / was in the name of devotion, love, sacrifice, or feeling, it made it more sacred to me. Does that make sense?

Okay, so for example, I wrote a paper last year about the Eucharist for Dracula’s class. If you step back and think about the Eucharist from a non-theological perspective, the ritual bears the same qualities that the experiences of love, pain, and suffering have also bore in my life. I guess that statement isn’t reasonably inferred since you aren’t the one that has experienced and assigned qualities to my personal experiences, but maybe you could infer those things about me from my writing or based on the way I tend to talk about the world. If not, I am telling you now that I have experienced all feeling in my life as intense, bodily, sacred, and loosely cannibalistic irrelevant to the scale or importance of any given feeling. Big or small, they are filtered through my brain and my body in this way. Living through those feelings, specifically love, has felt to me like a pronunciation of the different phases, ends, and sustained durations of reciprocal devotion in many different forms in the same way that reciprocal devotion is personified within the Eucharist sacrament. Think of love as a religious ceremony (a sacrament of sorts) while also considering the Eucharist as the same on a base level. Love is reciprocated (sometimes) until it’s not. Pain can be received from the acts of others. Longing often times stems from a lack of reciprocation from one party. The Eucharist itself is astonishing, but if you step back and look at it through the lens I just described, I think I can call it disgusting? It disgusts me (in a good way) because of how much sentiment and meaning lives within a single ritual designed to merge, in love, the human and the divine. It’s similar to sex in that way. It’s similar to wanting to eat the entirety of someone because you are so in love. I have written about the Eucharist so much at this point that even thinking about it like this makes it feel like it’s December 2025 again at 4:00 in the morning and I’m lying diagonal across my bed trying to digest the entirety of the Protestant Reformation and offer some new insight on how Donne’s Eucharist was some new 17th century poetic form of Medieval Alchemy. I’m laughing as I’m writing that because WHY DID I TURN THAT PAPER IN? I promise you, if I sat down and tried to explain what I was trying to say with that paper it would look like this, but with no educated end point in sight.

So, the Eucharist is one of those things. I’m not the first to think about it this way, I got that warm, excited feeling in my chest when I first discovered that people have been thinking about, writing about, and experiencing love in the same way that naturally occurred for me for literal centuries. As I have become more well-read, I’ve learned that everyone who writes about it does it in their own way too – every conceit, every style is a bit different. Donne for example: Eucharistic conceits as a way to talk about sex, love, and marriage. Love tied to this type of religious thinking is something that has existed for ages because, in some way, there is no other way to describe love without reaching for something higher. It could be religion, it could also be nature, or it could be poetic form; all of these things serve as a way to express how wide, how grand, how important love is, both the verb and the noun. They’re all writing toward love by writing about disgusting, sometimes veiled, rituals and expressions of love. The Eucharist isn’t veiled, but a flea sucking the blood of a poet’s muse is. I hope that explanation at least halfway sufficed, without drawing out an example of something I’ve written to make it more personal I think that that’s the closest I can come to explaining how it feels for me. For some reason The Pisces by Melissa Broder is also coming to mind as a more recent work that feels adjacent to the thing I’m talking about. I haven’t read The Pisces since I was in high school, but this particular passage comes to mind as something that aligns semi-closely with what I’m thinking about here:

 

“…Perhaps it was not for the sake of control over the terror of nature at all that they created their gods. Perhaps it was because the world, with all its beauty, was not enough. Simply being alive was not enough. The Greeks needed a new fantasy to make the world more exciting. With their war, wine, poetry, gods, and food, they needed to get high. Maybe we all did. Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even for just a moment.” (The Pisces, pg. 119)

She is writing about the creation of their gods, the Greeks. However, it was the devotion and the love that they experienced for their gods that got them all high. Disgusting. Absolutely, perfectly human and disgusting.

I developed, somewhere down the line of my personhood, to see love as a form of worship – a ritualized, raw, almost disgustingly authentic thing that I have always approached as a dogmatic participant. Dogma is another thing. Dogma can’t be love I don’t think. My brain, in reaching for some higher way to describe love, wants it to be a thing. However, the whole point of what I’m trying to say here, I guess, is what I’ve learned about love and how it’s changed. Dogmatic love, the kind that leaves no room for nuance or missteps, cannot be a healthy kind of love. I just don’t think that it leaves us space to show up as the flawed, imperfect, everchanging beings that we are. Maybe I’ll change my mind on this, too. Maybe it can be, but right now I think that for myself at least, I’ve come to associate dogma with a something negative – a strict, unchanging, intangible devotion that does not fundamentally align with how we are made as people. I think it works the same way with faith. I’m still learning how to navigate and trust in my relationship with God, but just based on my past experiences and what initially turned me away from religion when I was younger, I tend to think that religious dogma resembles something more like enslavement, something that is not a choice of free will, but rather a duty born from some unchanging, and therefore fundamentally inhuman, principle. God is unchanging, but people change. Religion and love are different, but I think that in love, people change, and a dogmatic approach really can create more problems and limitations working exactly against what the point of love is. I think that’s why it’s so important to understand the difference between a relationship with God and merely following God. Dogmatic pursuit of faith without a relationship feels claustrophobic to me. It feels like rules and constraints that always lead back to the question of “why?”. But a pursuit of faith built upon a relationship with God that is foundationally resting on both love and personal choice is entirely different. It’s freeing, it’s peaceful, it’s the kind of pursuit that does not require dogmatism to achieve.

I think my mind is actively reworking my own opinion as I’m writing about this. I’m writing toward love, but I’m also writing toward understanding. That’s part of the beauty of writing as a practice. I’ve thought about all of this a lot, but never sat down to really flesh out my thoughts on paper. You learn as you write, and maybe I’m learning that these thoughts don’t really make sense. Or maybe they’re just straight up wrong. Either way that’s okay, I’m really just thinking here.

I think that who I am now and where I am at in my brain, in my heart, and in my life, just means that this practice I’ve had of associating love with religiousness and piety has become more distant from me. I still reach for it as a metaphor of course. It’s beautiful. And I still wholeheartedly believe that love is akin to a religious experience. But I think that outside of my writing and my expressions of love, I’ve matured enough to not create some sort of false idol out of love or rely on love to save me from the other intrapersonal hardships that really are mine alone to deal with. With this separation there has also become more space for God and God’s love to reshape how I think, feel, and experience it. Love is patient, love is kind, love is not me seeking out something from another

person to satisfy a need that I am responsible to fulfill on my own. Love looks more like friendship. It looks like consideration. It looks like curiosity. It looks like admiring someone for who they are without abandoning yourself. It looks like supporting and believing in what they have going on in their life while continuing to cultivate and foster your own. It overall feels more selfless. Like: “I will care for you and support you in whatever capacity that you remain in my life.” And, “I will care for you and support you whether we live 10 hours apart or you live right down the road from me.” Or: “I like you and care for you because of who you are, not what you can do for me or how you make me feel.” I’m still kind of working through that last part. I think that everyone innately wants to feel chosen by someone else and discerning what is selflessly driven versus what is selfishly driven by that desire is tricky work, but, honestly, as I have thought about it and prayed about it more intentionally, it has become easier to discern what it is I’m looking for even when sometimes in the moment I don’t fully realize it. Like when I’m seeking approval versus when I am showing up having already approved myself, or when I am seeking to feel chosen versus when I know that I am already chosen by God. It’s hard work, but I feel like there has been a shift inside of me. The shift has also made me more okay with not having it. I am okay being alone. I am happy being alone. I’ve written about it before, how it gets lonely sometimes, but at the end of the day I am okay with simply loving in this way. It’s wider. It’s beautiful. It’s fulfilling in a different sense.

For a long time in my life, I looked at love as a sacred act that could save me in some way. It was a reckless pursuit of love, a pursuit that was driven by those things I mentioned above and consummated by the worshiping another person, the object of my love, engaging in sex that, around its edges, resembled to me what I thought the feeling of salvation would be like. The thing about a reckless pursuit of human love is that it’s unsanctified. Even taking religion out of the conversation for a second, regardless of how I would have pursued love in that state it would not have been set apart, set above, or pure simply based on what I was seeking from it. Religiously sanctified or sanctified in a secular, personal sense, however I wanted it to be… I was doing all the wrong things to achieve it. Well, not all of the wrong things, but I honestly don’t think I could have known better in some of the ways that I did end up falling short. First of all, my brain was not fully developed, and I think that truly as my brain has matured a lot of this understanding has really clicked into place for me. I also think that a lot of the holes in my heart that were created by things beyond my control left me perforated and scrambling to stop the bleeding. Fill the holes to stop the bleeding! Sorry, disgusting joke.

I think that you can kind of see it when someone feeds off of love in this way. Today I was at work, and something happened that spurred a lot of these thoughts. I want to preface this story with this: I am not looking down on or pointing fingers at someone else, this is just me observing, thinking, and reflecting on my own life while thinking about how we all have shared affinities that surface at odd times while also noting how easy these things are to miss if you’re not looking for them. So, without much context because I don’t feel super comfortable writing about real life people on here, today at work during the lull between the lunch and dinner rushes I smelled something really sweet coming from the kitchen. I’m not even a sweets person, but it smelled so good like the waffle cones on Main Street at the Magic Kingdom, and I knew I needed to get me a little piece of whatever it was. (Spoiler, and totally not the point of the story, I ended up having some and, as usual, it smelled way better than it tasted. Confirmed, yet again, not a sweets person. It was a graham cracker cookie something or other, I don’t know. I should know because I serve it, but I don’t!) I knew that this one person would know what it was, let’s call him P, so I went to the back to see if I could find him. I didn’t see him, so I went to check my phone that was in my purse hanging outside of the office door. I grabbed my phone and then, not two seconds later, out came P from the office. I asked him something along the lines of: “What is that sweet smell back here?” And, without missing a beat, he looked at me and said: “Oh, that’s me.” Now, normally I withhold my laughter from P. I try and avoid P in some ways, honestly. But dammit that caught me off guard and it made me LAUGH. I mean, I laughed in that very real way that you feel release something in your brain. It was just so dumb and so matter of fact that I forgot for a second that P walks the line when it comes to stuff like this. He watched me laugh. Like watched me watched me, and he started smiling. This clicked something in my brain. I don’t know why, but like for a second, he saw me. And I know that he saw me because the smile he offered to me in return and the look that I saw in his eyes allowed me to see him back. Again, one of those reciprocal acts. I don’t mean this in some weird flirting way. I just mean that, authentically, I think I saw P for a moment, and it wasn’t anything he said or did it was just what I saw in his eyes. It was like he was drinking me in. And usually when I look at P’s eyes, they’re kind of steely. But they were so open despite them being a little bit crinkled up from his smile, like he wanted not my laughter or the genuineness of my reaction, but more the feeling that my reaction elicited in him. He made me laugh, I was approving him, for once something he did elicited a genuine reaction from me. I knew this in an instant, I don’t know how to explain it other than that I just felt it. And in that moment, I felt a little bit uncomfortable. Not by the silent truth that he had accidentally shared with me, but because of how real I felt right in front of him when I threw my head back and opened my mouth. He saw me for a second and I saw him. I think that he would have drunk in any woman’s laughter who approved him in that way, it just happened to be me this time. When the moment passed, I was still smiling at him. I said, “You are such an idiot.” He kept looking at me and then he kind of turned his head to the side and asked, “Do you like me?” I heard it then. I saw it before in his eyes when he was watching me laugh, but the iteration of what I already knew he was thinking confirmed for me that I didn’t misperceive that moment. I laughed, shook my head, and said, “No.”

 

Thinking about this experience helped me write a lot of the things I was talking about earlier, because I saw in him a reflection of my old self in some way. I understood him for a second. I try hard not to judge peoples’ character. I guess this is a prime example of why I shouldn’t because for as many thoughts and feelings that I have toward him and his actions, I am no different than him. I am no better than him. I have done exactly what P did and opened myself up to drink in love in a way that prioritized sustaining me. Maybe now I just have a better grasp on some areas than he does. And I’m sure he’s grasped more tightly areas that I am still ignorant to. But P, I think, looks for that reckless pursuit of ____ in other people too. I don’t know exactly what hole he’s trying to fill, but I do have him figured out enough to understand how he goes about it.

I started thinking about all of this a long time ago. Like I said, I wrote about a pious kind of love for many years and, even still, I write that way, just more distantly. I think I started to notice the change because I feel like I love someone again. I’m not in love with them. But then again, I’ve started loving so many new, wonderful people since moving to Virginia. So, what’s the big deal? I guess the difference is that it is a romantic love of sorts, way out on the periphery, but more than anything it’s platonic. And I’ve noticed that it feels normal. It doesn’t feel like I need to start enmeshing my life with his or crawl out of my skin and live inside of him. (Thank you, boundaries. And thank you, healing. And thank you, me for finding a fullness that already lives inside of myself.) It also doesn’t feel disgusting in that way that I described before. It feels like it’s not really even a big deal. Which is actually very, very funny to me because that is never a sentence that I thought I would ever write. It’s something that I noticed crept up on me, definitely not from something he did but from, over time, learning him as a person. I think it’s something I can live and die with and probably will not be affected by either way whether he ever knows or not. Because him knowing is not the point. It’s there, and it will be there, and I will continue to live my life. If any of my friends are reading this right now (first of all hi, I love you) and you’re rolling your eyes or you’re about to text me and ask me what the fuck is wrong with me… just know that as I am writing this, I’m looking at all the cards that are out on the table. I’m lookin okay? And I still don’t see any reason why that would change how I feel. As I’ve tried to explain throughout this post, whether it’s a change that’s happened through God or maturity or experience, the love that I feel isn’t the kind that needs to receive something back in order for it to exist. The reciprocity of devotion or lack thereof that has spurred so many intense feelings of love, sadness, and longing in my life… it doesn’t exist for me so much with this one. This love is just there and it’s something that I am being forced to acknowledge because, whether I know how it came to be or not, it does in fact exist.

The feelings I have when I consider him remind me of what Clarice Lispector wrote in Near to the Wild Heart: “Where does music go when it stops playing?” I think the music lingers and lives somewhere inside of us. Because the music, what I see as this music – the talking, the laughing, the jokes, and the questions – they have stopped playing on my end, but it doesn’t change the fact that I heard the music and that I can still hear it in my head even after it is gone. Music can be like love, and I think this love is like music. I hear it, but I don’t see, feel, or touch the thing that is making it. That’s how I feel right now. The love is just staying inside of me and that is okay. Truly, it feels good. Because my feelings feel healthy. Because it crept up on me from a friendship that I have held at arms distance for nearly half a year, maintained boundaries, kept my head on straight, and took a step back from all in order to respect myself. And in spite of that! I did still start to love him somewhere along the way, and it hasn’t changed anything. We could never date. We could never kiss. We could never be anything more than friends, and that would be okay with me because I know him. That is enough for me because me loving him requires nothing back.

xx Olivia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWpjKTAj29k