Not
the first part, that’s like my whole thing. The “let love find you” part.
Last week, I left the
library where I worked with Mr. Makeout Music. There were a lot of good reasons
for doing so (Work crushes can sometimes be a sign that I need to be doing
something more absorbing.) but the main reason was that it was exhausting to
keep pretending to be okay around him. I wasn’t. Now that I’ve got the time and
space and naps to heal, the pain of him is almost gone.
Because
I couldn’t bring myself to walk past MM one more time, Sweetie went to clean
out my desk for me, with Awesome Genderqueer Librarian’s help. In the bag with
my collection of kid art and my desk socks was a lovely stack of “We miss you!”
cards from kids and coworkers. It was very gratifying to still be valued there,
after three sometimes-crying months of love-shame and election grief. The woman
who wrote the above advice is one of my favorite humans in the universe, but it
unleashed a stream of gleeful annoyance that I’m kind of excited to paragraph.
It’s
partly that she knew (Ugh, everybody knew.) that my leaving was even about
heartbreak at all, but mostly it’s this—I’m mad at myself for spending three
months crying about a guy who got scared of me because I made the first move.
He has tried to frame it in other ways, but from where I’m sitting, he adored
me until I took his hand.
Of
course he had the right to decline my advances for any reason, but I hated the
way I felt around him after that—too big, too excited, too complicated, too
much. About our weird somewhere-between-friendship-and-the other-thing
situation, he kept saying “just let things develop organically” every time I
had a question or needed a clarification, but I think what he meant was, let
things develop on his terms.
Even
the way our flirtation started, with him visiting my department or my office
when he could (He had keys to my office, but I certainly didn’t have keys to
his.), with me waiting around with an open heart and what I hoped was a pretty
face for him to come and be praised, it sometimes made me feel helpless and
trapped, even when things were nice. In one of our fights, I said I wasn’t a
web cam girl, just waiting around to approve of him. (He probably wished he hadn’t
told me his porn preferences…) The way the building is designed, he could see
me from almost any of his posts, and it felt really claustrophobic sometimes.
The
“let love come to you” (if you’re a woman) paradigm is part of what makes the
traditional structures of dating unworkable to me. When I like someone, I
really like him/her/them. When I want ANYTHING, I try very hard to be awesome
at getting it. If I’m attracted to somebody, I tell them. I ask for what I want
and see if it works for them. I’m not Sleeping fucking Beauty, I’m an
adventuress on a quest. On a good day, I’m a goddess, and men have been known to
kneel down for me without my even having to command it. I have a dominant,
honest, brave, ridiculous heart that knows what it wants and will always go
after it.
The
passiveness of the “wait for love to find you” paradigm takes me to a dark
place. It reminds me of necrophila. It reminds me of rohypnol. (When I just
Googled that for spelling, the horrifying third choice was “rohypnols buy.”) It
reminds me of back when there was MySpace and all of my guy friends liked girls
whose profile pictures managed these slack, vacant expressions. I could never
have made my face look uninhabited enough to resemble the ghost/zombie girls
who were the style of the Mid-Zeroes. It reminds me of the time I was told that
I smile a lot for a submissive.
The
boxed-in passiveness of the advice reminds me of Moana being told that
everything she needed was on this one little island and that all she had to do
to be happy was reject the song of her own soul. (Did anyone else see her and
her many new islands as a polyamory tale? Maybe it was just me.) Like Moana, I
am an explorer, a leader, a navigator. I won’t sit in a box and wait to be
clicked on, and I hope to never tunnel-vision myself into any more narrow
little islands of gendered constraint.
Like many of my rants,
this is really a culmination of an argument with myself. Since my brokeny
teenage years, I’ve always “known” in my heart that I’m not passive enough to
be loved by a man, that I could never be compliant or compromising enough for a
straight cis male. That idea is offensive to one and all, but it didn’t come
from nowhere. I would love for it to go away.
When I look at it
objectively, I see that Mr. Makeout Music was a rare exception. I am
surrounded, past and present, by men who have enjoyed being sought out,
pursued, and pounced upon. Far from being a turnoff, my literal and figurative
bigness and enthusiasm have drawn the best, most adventurous, most oomph-filled
men to me. Some of them have even stuck around.
Though I’ll always
appreciate the way that he woke up my body and heart, I think Mr. Makeout Music
mostly served to show me what I don’t want—I never want to try and make myself
smaller or less in hopes that someone with a narrower scope might see me. I
never want to be stuck on an island again.
I know that romantic love isn’t something that can be
to-do-listed into existence, but I WILL have agency. I will not sit in a box
and wait. I will not listen to the fears and the family/social pressures that
kept me away from the water. I aim to untie myself from the
hetero/mononormative shore and learn to sail. My heart knows the way.