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What It Means To Love Her
At a concert a few weeks ago, I took notice of the two girls standng in front of me. Both were in their late adolescence, one short-haired and boyish and the other undeniably feminine. Face to face, they locked and unlocked their hands, swinging their arms to the music while watching the performance as much as they watched one another. Even the musician they were there to see couldn’t have tempted their gazes away from each other for too long. As I watched them, I couldn’t help but think of CK and me. Together, we are just like that, enveloped in each other’s presence and content to reside in a space apart from others. Together, we share thoughts too intimate to be communicated above a whisper. Together, we would have smiled at those girls, knowingly.
To my left, I heard a boy whisper to his friend a hushed message, indecipherable save for the word “lesbians.†I was less certain than he was that these girls were more than just friends. I had my doubts. What was undeniable, however, was that they were in love.
I object when people insist on labeling me bisexual – or worse, bicurious. They hear me profess my love for CK, and at once, they disregard the many, many male precedents who have come before and after her. CK is not a fetish. She is not an experiment. CK is not the exception to the rule even though she is far from the rule. I do not love her in spite of her womanhood, but because of it. Yet I hold no misconceptions about my overwhelming attraction toward men; I am not interested in women in that manner at all. I am not bicurious. I am CK-curious.
There is something about my relationship with CK that I have never been able to pinpoint. I think I now know what it is. Our relationship is marked by a level of emotional and physical intimacy unmatched by any relationship I have shared with another woman.
I love her. I love her in the way that I love my girlfriends, but in another way as well, not just unconditionally but intimately. I feel for her in a manner only a lover can. I appreciate qualities like her voice. I like it whether it is pitched high with laughter or dipped low with reprimand and concern. I like her when she is girlish and I like her when she is boyish, but mostly she’s in between. And I like that too. I like her deliciously disheveled as much as I like her when she is in stockings and pearls. I have picked up her habit of saying “baby” and her Southern accent is now more song to me than drawl.
It’s ironic that my first romance-related entry on Sex and the Ivy is about a woman. But perhaps, it is fitting, because loving CK taught me just how unimportant sex is. She has told me repeatedly that we would never work out romantically. Besides our insurmountable preference for men, we’d be faced with disagreements about all the essentials – money, lifestyle, and most importantly, sex. But in a relationship like ours, sex, for the first time, hardly matters.
August 22nd, 2006 at 6:50 am
I agree, sex isn\’t and shouldn\’t be important in love. The opposite is true; a truly intimate connection from sex could only come when the partners are in love. I feel our primal instincts make most connections physical; someone has to come along and change that before sex has any meaning.
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:29 am
i don\’t know anything about love. in my mind love used to be so well-defined. it was clearly differentiated from lust, from temporary affection. i saw love as something belonging to the details of life. i believed that one could and should be fully aware of the parameters of one\’s love for another. capable of characterizing its nuances, its causes; the reasons were always important. WHY do i love this person? perhaps this was just my way of controling something wild. but i\’ll admit, i miss that clarity.
i\’m not sure what bothers me more. that you can\’t verbalize your feelings for me or that I can\’t verbalize mine for you. in my case, it may just be a knack that i\’ve lost. or maybe it is simply that i\’ve finally accepted the impossibility of establishing one standard of love. i\’ve tried half-heartedly these past few months to think of the details of my love for other people in my life. people whom I love without a doubt. people whose relationships i don\’t question. these days the list is short. pippa. i was unsuccessful. i couldn\’t really get past \”pippa\’s really funny\”, \”pippa makes me laugh\”. of course the other thing that immediately came to mind is that she listens to me. our relationship maintains a balance in a way that none of my other relationships seem to. and she loves me. there\’s also that. i say it like it\’s an afterthought, but really it feels like the main reason.
i\’m not sure if i should be resisting that or just acknowledging it as the truth. but how can that be love? cherishing someone because they cherish you back? there has to be something missing to that. and there, you see? i\’ve done it again. trying to create a standard.
August 22nd, 2006 at 5:37 pm
CK, I think that’s why it was so hard for those outside our group to define what you had/have with S. So many people — my blockmates, mutual acquaintances, etc. — kept asking me, “So what are they? They’re not just friends. Do they like each other?” And all I could say was, “It’s so much more than that.” But I couldn’t say the word “love” either because though that was my perfect description, I know they would have understood what I was saying even less.
The thing is, most of what we mean and feel goes unspoken. No one tries to verbalize it. You just can’t. That’s why I started at your hair, lingered to your lips, moved to love, and then realized that there was so much more to be said. And CK, 2,000 words — which is how much this four-parter has come out to — don’t even begin to explain fully all I feel. But I guess it’s a worthwhile effort to get it down as best I can, because at least then, some people (myself included) can better understand.