I used to write stories about it, about couples falling in love. Their love was so strong, it could almost conquer the world I had created for them. I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know why it happened. I don’t really know anything about it, but there isn't anything I can do about it now because I'm stuck. I’m stuck in a loop of questioning. Do men actually fall in love? Does this feeling we call “love” even have a meaning? Why have my dreams always been about love? 

 

Okay, okay, I think a recap might be better. It all started two months ago. I was working on my new book about a soon-to-end marriage, kind of a cliche but I really needed the money. At the time I was with a man, no, I was with “The Man” (literally he was chosen “The Man” of the year). Everything was perfect, a happy relationship, good business, awesome friends, everything was as perfect as I could ever imagine. Who could have known it would all come to this? Let me tell you, in my note, about how everything I had written about was a lie.

 

Over the past decade, I came to one and only one point. Being a woman is the hardest thing that can happen to a person, no matter what. All the stories I have written have a woman in them: sad, happy, excited, dead, evil etc. doesn’t matter, there is always one. And they always face the same end somehow, they feel love. Why? I don’t know. That is when I realized I’d been writing about something I didn’t even know. I’ve been told since I was four years old that when I grow up I’ll fall in love and get married and have children and be happy. I am not happy. I am not married. I don’t have kids, I hate kids. I didn’t do any of those things and I’m forty. I am a woman who hasn’t done anything that has been repeatedly said to her for four decades. 

 

They always say to start with love; I mean the cycle is encrypted on us. It was also true for me till this point, which also means my stories haven't all been a complete lie. They at least included the word “love”. 

 

You remember “The Man” of my life. We were never planning to get married, but we were happy, I was happy. Or at least that was what I thought. Last month, though, I caught “The Man” with another woman, his therapist to be precise. That night he told me he didn’t know what happened between us, he said he fell out of love, and drifted away from me. That was my tipping point. I forgot everything I knew about love, everything. What was love? What did he fall out of? Why was I with him in the first place? When I got home, I started thinking, I didn’t feel anything towards him other than momentary excitement, was that what love was? I don’t think so… I don’t think I ever got to feel what love was because my goals have been set since I was four.

 

The word “love” was my awakening, the word that had been encrypted on me, on us since we were four. Being a woman came with “love”,  as a package deal. I don’t think any of us will actually feel “love” though because the “love” we are taught is not love, it is just a part of an unnatural but a normalized loop.