Diary of a Lover Girl

I've got all these feelings collecting dust in my house

I can’t stand our mechanical times of Find My Friends and Oura Rings. We’ve smothered the magic out of love with hygienic rationality and therapy-speak.

Love is only powerful when it is magical. You know what therapy lacks? It lacks that invisible plasma of energy that feels like desire or longing. It lacks serendipity and coincidence. It lacks soul. It lacks yearning. It lacks happy accidents that bring people together for a shared lifetime.

Every collage needs a haiku: Eros carved in stone // Polish scherzos softly play // Cherries, roses bloom.

I don’t want clinical love. I want the irrational, aching, Flaubertian love that novels are made out of it. I want Botticellian romance, Venusian passion, and Proustian tenderness. I want the kind of love expressed in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë Suite No. 2, Dickinson’s Wild Nights – Wild Nights!, and Klimt’s The Kiss. (Keep the Ravel playing as you read the rest.)

I want to live life at a biblical magnitude. I want memories that last in my mind like the crenulated imprint left by the band of my skirt, only to be discovered before a shower in the overripe heat of an August night.

I want a soulmate—celestial Siamese twins. I want something that’s mystical and carnal and knotted, something that leaves me peeled, radical, and free—Godiva.

Girl friends

This is what both the libertines and celibates got right and the romantics got stupidly wrong: What if romantic love is not the highest calling?

Having a grand old time with the girl friends is paradise. Eden-red manicures, apple strudels, giving in to temptations made by Miu Miu, snakes not included and Adams sold separately.

This HEALED me.

I’ve never found Samantha Jones relatable, but I will say this about her: she showed everyone that her true love was found in friendship, not in romance. She did not look to men as her source of lifelong affection, but to her three girl friends.

The nuns understood this as well: you can find your consummate love with God and seek companionship in sisterhoods and among colleagues.

Fliiiiiirting

Flirting isn’t limited to romance. Flirting is an attitude that only playful and happy people can have and enjoy. It’s the virtue of being uncommitted—to people, to philosophies, to bets. Flirting turns uncertainty, something we usually fear, into pleasure.

It’s being able to take yourself less seriously. It’s being able to react to discomfort with humor. Fortune is a lady and she favors whoever makes her laugh. Most people can sting like a bee but not everyone can float like a butterfly.

You can change a conversation you don’t want to have by turning your shoulder, lowering your chin, giving a mischievous smile—a gesture my mother would call “coquettish”—and asking a slightly provocative personal question. Flirting lets you turn the tables without killing the tête-à-tête.

Love, the feeling

LoVe IsN’t A fEeLiNg It’S a DeCiSiOn—shut up that’s not what this piece is about. I want to talk about love as the feeling.

If I existed in twelfth-century Provence, I’d be a troubadour, someone who wrote poems and songs dedicated to the feeling of love. Their verses were inspired by butterflies in the stomach and excitement-induced insomnia. To the troubadours, love was a feeling so deeply felt and prized that it could not risk being deflated by the raciness of impure intentions or the practicality of rearing a family. (As usual, love, sex, and marriage are three very mutually exclusive things for the French). In this context, love is purely about that feeling of taking flight. That’s what I’m writing this for.

From the Belvedere in Vienna

Your job isn’t to limit your possibilities with your human estimations of reality but to seize unexpected opportunities. When you try to control everything, things can only be as good as your imagination. But, the best things—the miracles—often exist outside of what you think is possible.

Thank you for reading & with much love,

Sherry

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