#westerna

I'll be writing them a guest post on the Tauriel (of Hobbit fame) debacle within the next week or so and potentially joining their team/super-secret girl band!

You jut stopped scrolling, thank you. To preface, I'm a girl who bought it to see what the fuss was about and threw it across my room after three pages. I had to google '50 Shades main characters' to write this essay. tumblr likes to dissect its relationship values, but I want to dissect something even more fundamental. Why love?

tumblr itself is about love and the lack thereof. tumblr is essentially about loving fictional characters and real-life people, except for the weird hipster part which is mostly about loving a lifestyle. Why love? What's the point?

Why does a website full of teenage girls feel so strongly about false love, despite the obvious fact that we're all hormonal teenage girls? Why do we heart and reblog the obvious chemistry between the Doctor and Rose Tyler and devote entire blogs to dissecting the deeply flawed relationship between Mother Gothel and Rapunzel? Why do we all agree that we hated Coraline's Other Mother and loved Paranorman's family? What's so important about having other people really care for you?

tumblr is genuinely upset about the Grey/Steele relationship. tumblr is genuinely upset that it's one-sided. We're okay with one-sided longing in general - doesn't that describe everyone who's ever watched Sherlock or the Avengers or reblogged that post of famous actor butts and went 'yeah i can identify all of these'. tumblr is not okay with the fact that Grey uses Steele. That is not love, tumblr and every mom ever says. That is a bit not good.

When you ask a random teenage girl (or my inner circle of friends) why love? we answer with need. We need someone to care for and care about. You could say it's maternal instincts if you're being particularly scientific or patriarchal depending on how you want to argue that and how you feel like pissing off.

Why love for me personally? Like the Queen love ballad 'Find Me Somebody to Love', I too need someone. Life is terribly lonely right now, and I'm not afraid to admit I crave affection. 

Here's what I respond with when asked Why Love?, in fictional form because I am far too shy to actually ask anyone out:

‘Blueshift’

Her eyes starred with tears, a new Big Bang threatening to expand into the vast unknown of whatever worn, butter-soft T-shirt he was wearing today. He gathered her up into a giant bear hug and sat both of them down on the Homeric, equally worn sofa. Curled up in his arms, she finally melted into a bright pool of tears, creating irregular galaxies on his shirt. He held her, and let all the fear and rage and hurt pour out of his beloved’s grief like streams of dark matter. He knew better than to offer her more mindless platitudes, and instead made soft, soothing murmurs in between covering the crown of her head with kisses until she stopped crying and started hiccupping (a particularly endearing trait he always wanted to laugh at but never quite dared). When she finally took a long, shuddery breath and did that near-magic thing where she held her breath until she stopped her hiccups by sheer force of will because she hated the way they tickled her throat, he reached behind both of them for a tissue and gravely offered her one. She blew her nose in a businesslike manner, because once she was done crying she was done. It had taken him a while to realize that, because she normally wasn’t a crier. He’d learned that her crying spells focused on specific dates and were as regular as meteor showers, requiring large amounts of observation, cuddling, and tea- rather like when they observed actual meteor showers together. He knew she’d be amused if he told her this apt personal metaphor but decided to fold her back into his arms. The first few months of their relationship when she had been coming off  her too-strong antidepressants were the strangest, because she was so emotionally numb and anxious and in a constant low-level panic attack that as she was weaned off them it had taken both of them a while to get used to the moodier, more normal version of her. Likewise, it had taken her forever to realize that she could express emotion, any emotion to him. And that was okay with him- he’d patiently held her hand through it all and picked her up from therapy when she wasn’t able to drive herself home and witnessed the breakthrough of the more emotionally stable version of the girl he had fallen in love with.  They were both essentially nurturing people, and he knew it both killed her to need help and loved having someone to finally totally and completely love and trust. Hell, they’d even swapped laptops for one panicky, memorable autumn night involving scholarships and geese. If that didn’t show their respective high levels of trust, he didn’t know what did. They’d traded horrible funeral memories and traumatized each other so much they stayed up for fifty-two hours straight surviving solely on momentum until collapsing into catatonic states and sleeping for eighteen hours. They made each other waffles on her grandfather’s cavernous waffle iron and talked about places they’d lived and things they’d seen. Behind the spiny, artfully devastating sarcasm, he’d found a broken genius. She’d been through so much- he didn’t know how she’d managed to turn it all into something brilliantly wonderful instead of shattering into a black hole of despair. She took him through so many new experiences that Before Her seemed like the vast emptiness of interstellar space. Falling in love with her was like discovering that the Earth was round, he decided. He kissed her one last time when he realized she’d fallen asleep on his chest.