True Love Is About So Much More Than Sex

When I taught a love literature class a few years ago, to a class comprised entirely of young college girls, I assigned stories and essays about various forms of love. Complaints emerged that texts I was assigning were not about love at all, when in reality the texts I had chosen were not about heterosexual romantic relationships.  I tried to explain to them that love was manifested in all forms, but they were not having it. They wanted to read sexy tales between men and women and I had let them down. Personally, I have a really hard time being romantic in the clichéd sense: diamond commercials make me shudder, romantic comedies make me want to light something on fire. I have asked my boyfriend to please promise he wouldn’t get on one knee if he proposed, because it I think it’d make me puke on the inside.

I don’t know why I’m like this. There are also parts of my personality that aren’t at all conventionally feminine. There is not a dainty bone in my body. I had to be resilient growing up, so I guess became a pretty tough broad, so I can’t get past prescribed romance and faux chivalry. That is not to say that I don’t appreciate romance that is not pukey; one of the nicest moments of my life was when my boyfriend and I were stuck at home during a blizzard and we sat in the dark listening to the thunder snow. See, I don’t hate love! But when I see saccharine tomfooleries taken straight from romantic comedies that star the vapid Jennifer Aniston, I can’t help but grimace.

The problem is our society’s obsession with heteronormative relationships, seen on shows like “The Bachelor” in which catty women compete for the affection of a prized unctuous prig:

• Women, you are worthless if you are not paired up with a man.
• Your sole purpose in life is to marry some dude and crank out his babies.
• You should also expect expensive blood diamonds because DeBeers says so.
• You should be treated like a frail, hemophiliac princess.
• If you’re single on Valentine’s Day, you will eventually die alone in your home with your cats who might begin eating your face because no one notices that you are dead.

Though I love my boyfriend very much, our relationship is not enough to sustain me spiritually — there is so much more to love than romance. Like most normal people, I deeply value my relationships with friends and family. I am often so filled with love that I feel like I’m bursting at the seams like a tightly encased sausage. I love writing more than I can even explain. I love literature. I love art. I love music. I love this taco I’m eating. I love nature. I love humanity. I love beauty so much that sometimes I get so overwhelmed by a freaking a tree branch that my chest literally aches (see, I am romantic). Hell, I even love Kermit the frog and entire cast of Muppets, for that matter. And lastly, I love myself, despite our culture’s insistence that I don’t.

The overall message I was trying to communicate to that class is: romantic relationships don’t have to occupy the center of our world. There is more to life than stories with sexy results. Love is not always necessarily about boinking. The literature I was teaching was about love. Because really, what the hell isn’t?