Before Beginning

I am a hopeless romantic and I hate romantic comedies. Hate them. Not in the way you hate a certain food you never make or music you avoid, but in the way you hate someone you once trusted. Growing up with romantic comedies, I looked to them for a preview of love before it happened. I studied. I knew I would be tested.

I knew I had to have the look down. I had to be pretty with minimal make-up. I had to have straight, white teeth, styled hair, clean skin, clean nails, groomed eyebrows, painted toes, toned abs and simply deny body hair and my period existed.

I also had to have the personality down. If I wanted a happy ending I had to be kind (but not a pushover), intelligent (but not in a nerdy way), interesting (but not too over the top), driven (but not in a bitchy way), I was allowed to be slightly too artistic (because it makes you interesting), slightly too neurotic (because love would set me straight), slightly too naive (because it's charming), but above all I should be sure to be young (or at least look young). So I knew I had to be quick. I had a time frame I was working in.

And it all had to be effortless.

I learned that being effortlessly beautiful was important above all. You couldn't look like you were 'trying' or you were the slutty, mean girl or maybe the clueless best friend. And neither of them EVER got a happy ending. All dream girls are this way.

It's not easy to be effortlessly kind, either. Or effortlessly intelligent. Or artsy. Or driven. Or charming. Or even naive.

(Sidenote: Have you ever felt the expectation that being cynical or worldly was anti-feminine? It took me a good while to figure out why I felt slightly gauche if a guy was more naive than I was. I was sure to never show this opinion, however. Gauche girls do not find love. And love equals happy.)

Oh yes, and be sure the man chases you and not the other way around, you desperate stage-5 clinger.

Finally, one day I looked up from my eyebrow appointment (I had nowhere special to go) which I was annoyed was running late because I had planned to paint a new headboard using some architectural salvage while wearing crest white strips and now I didn't have time for my ballet workout, and realized something was wrong.

I had an epiphany right there, laying all pink and vulnerable on a table as some girl poured hot wax on my face. I had been molding myself to be this ideal person for someone I had never met. I had put in so much effort into my effortlessness that I was exhausted and a little lost. So I took a step back and analyzed myself to find the root of my problem.

Romantic comedies. And maybe just the whole year I was 14.

I still believe in love and falling in love, but I have come to see that romance, as it is portrayed, can be a dangerous influence. Love, romantic love, is seen as the cornerstone to happiness and can be used as a measuring stick to evaluate the success in your life. And it's not like you can escape it. I realized trying to reevaluate my feelings on love and my reliance on who I was in relation to love, outside of media portrayal, was like trying to go on a diet in a world made out of cheeseburgers. And in this cheeseburger alternate-universe the amount and quality of your cheeseburger was of paramount interest to yourself, society and your mother.

Movies, even the ones made purely for explosions and boobs, will have a plot or subplot about love in them. Songs are, conservatively, written about love 112% of the time. The greatest and most enduring novels of all time are mostly about love. I'm pretty sure 'chick-lit' was a term coined to make women not feel bad about buying romance novels without the negative stigma attached.(Which there shouldn't be anyway. If a women reads about love she's pathetic, but if she watches a foreign movie about love with subtitles she's cultured? I never understood that.)

Double goes for most young adult fiction that isn't desperately trying to squeeze money out of the Harry Potter fandom. (Read: The ones now trying to squeeze money out of the Twilight fandom.)

Comics, though they are stereotyped as the realm of boys, or socially inept men, have always had love in them right back to Superman and Lois Lane. Even videogames, and especially some of the most beloved, have love as the central theme to their plot.

Love is everywhere! It's in the air! Everyone has it, has had it, lost it, is getting it back, needs it, wants it, and what can I buy, and what do I have to do, and who do I have to fuck to get it?

I believe in love. But I don't know what it means anymore.

So I started this blog as a little experiment.

"Dead scandals," wrote Lord Bryon in Don Juan, "form good subjects for dissection."

Byron knew a thing or two about love and a thing or two about writing about it. He was talking about gossip, but I think his theory holds water. Instead of trying to figure out love through my experiences with it, I am going to try and understand it by how it is being presented to me in all forms of media. I am going to find out what I can learn about love, about what it is and isn't, from the movies, books, songs, comics, ads, videogames etc that have love in it and review what I learned here. I'm going to see what they are getting right and where they are going wrong and how it's helping or hurting the 14 year old girls that come after me.

And hopefully, in the dissection, I can learn something about love and about myself. And maybe you'll find something here for you, too. Maybe by the end of it, whenever that is, more than one person will know what love is.