How do you declare love is boundless on a billboard with such stark edges?
by jaime ding
This article has recorded audio. Click ‘play’ to hear jaime read it out loud.
I love stories, and I love stories about love most of all: I love engagement stories, heartbreak, meet cutes, and of course, white supremacist heteronormative reality dating shows. I love, through these shows, how we talk and watch and experience love, how the idea of love, passes us through so many emotions. I also am, I must admit, watching for the signs, nuggets that show proof of value. I analyze our experiences, both real and reality, because holding romantic love, unlike love for work (“passion,” they call it), offers power. Sometimes/often I do not want to admit how important this rewards system seems to be, especially with how prevalent it is in our visual language, especially as a cis woman, especially after these pandemic year, and yet the pervasiveness remains. Engagement photoshoots show how you chose right and were chosen, you did the right thing, and you hold an absolute earned happily ever after – a visible, understandable connection where you are connected to another, and hence your body, mind, and person have value.
I think I am not saying anything new when I say love always seems to come at a price. Love has to be earned: to love someone, that singular someone needs to meet certain requirements. Love holds prestige as the most precious, highly valued prize. On reality tv, the most visible place you can win, you can never simply put all your eggs in one basket; offering attention to just one person is seen as weak and foolish, the wrong way to win the game. Contestants are thoroughly tested, checking off boxes, meeting and exceeding expectations, and when the insta-hot girl and the insta-hot boy say that they love each other for the first time, they are pop culture’s most visible winners. This love has a string of obligations, the reward being aesthetic happiness. They look well, happy, a complete package, to sell and be sought after.
“Love holds prestige
as the most precious, highly valued prize.”
The first time I read All About Love, I was still in love with work. I was twenty-three, undeterred by institutional apathy, looking to histories to perhaps fill holes in the present. bell hooks defines love in the book with words we may be familiar with: care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, respect, all with action and as a choice. At twenty-three, these words reaffirmed to me that romance was not the end-all be-all notion of love, and, satisfied with how this aided my own ideas of self, I proceeded to give my love to an institution. My rather large, rather loud, yellow, curious person, mind, and body, hoped to be valued by the institution: loved? by the institution, perhaps share power and make change with the institution.
Years later, reading the book again, in community and in still yet another apathetic institution, I understand her visions and guidance with a different frame of mind. With words, as a word, love is defined again and again as what it is, what it is! (I too am adding to this pile, with my own jumble of words.) But love also is about what it is not – and upon this round of reading, thinking, dismissing, nervously discussing, grappling with grieving, lying around, I realized that love is not a budget. Love is not so precious that it must be saved, and love is not a collectable, shiny, special trophy.
I remember the moment when I realized this and sputtered out how maybe love does not have to be super special. It can be all of this and maybe none of it. We give and receive service, and trust and care, but perhaps it does not have to be artificially perceived as scarce, found only at the rarest of moments. The act and choice of love does not have to be given out in transactional bits and pieces, measured and carefully calculated, wielded at moments to retain the most power. We can be and belong and that will most likely encompass love, because love does not need to be on a budget [1]. We do not have to be on a budget.
Endnote
I think I still have not said anything new. Perhaps we all knew the Earth was round but I have been carefully tending to meadows, never seeing that edges can be infinite. Much love to bell hooks, thank you.