Reflection: Is Love Possible?
I knew the second I saw this prompt for the Month of Darkness that this chapter was both an amazing opportunity to look at many sides of love, as well as an exceptionally difficult chapter for me to write. Love has been… difficult for me, in just about all its forms. Both something I crave as well as something I fear. Hard to imagine that anything would change about that just because I was dead. Also, making the chapter based around love be totally dedicated to the boys was another conscious choice of mine. Oftentimes, love and men are seen as separate things, or at least things that don’t mesh well together. Men won’t talk about their feelings, or men don’t feel love as strongly, things that I’ve heard a lot growing up in media and from people I’ve interacted with. So for this entry, I’ve decided to discuss the four main types of love Grey and Diego discussed.
Familial
The love of one’s family is supposed to be sacred. The kind of love that’s guaranteed to you at birth and one that will last your entire life. For me, this has been pretty much true. My immediate family is definitely like this, and if I need anything ever, I know that I can reach out to them and they’ll be there for me, though I know this isn’t true for everyone. The problem then becomes the actual act of reaching out.
See, I’ve gotten it into my head that all of my problems are my problems, and I need to be self-sufficient to figure them out. That leaning on others is a crutch and I shouldn’t need to depend completely on the help of others. Asking for help, or more often my biggest struggle, money, means weakness and debt (both monetary and personal) that I need to repay. A tit-for-tat relationship, if you will. Family bonds aren’t supposed to be like that (though definitely pay back money family lends you).
More than anything, my biggest flaw within familial love has been my feeling of “otherness.” I’ve always felt like the outsider in my family. My interests were always niche, hyperfocused, and normally not something that anyone in my family wanted to talk about. While I was never really shut down the way I know others were, I was often redirected or given polite responses that made me feel as though my interests were so outside the realm of anyone else’s that they may as well not be shared. My sisters were always more social, hard working, and, in my eyes, more talented and so they fit in better. I now know that a lot of the reasons I couldn’t do the things they could have been because of my inability to focus on anything long enough to develop the skill without having that hyperfocus in place, but the feelings of inadequacy that I developed entirely on my own are still in place.
Despite all of this, I know that my family loves me and will support me, despite my inability to communicate properly with them. I wish I was better at it, and I am working as hard as I can to be more present in my family, though much like Diego, I feel so far removed from them that I often struggle.
Spiritual
This form of love was entirely meant to be on Diego’s shoulders, though I added in Grey’s perspective because of the lack of belief he gets from me. I hear all the time that God is Love, and then in so many breaths after all I hear is hate and vitriol. “God won’t love you if you’re gay, God won’t love you if you’re trans, God won’t love you if you vote for this person or that person” and assorted other bullshit. Diego’s fear is that God won’t love him because of the monster he’s become, and this is a struggle for him while trying to reconcile his love for God. Grey, being the worst person in the world to come to in a crisis of faith (because I am the worst person for that job) has to help navigate his friend’s struggle, while having already reconciled his own.
When I was a teenager, probably about thirteen or so, I was very involved with a church on Long Island where I was from. It was a big church, and very pretty by churchy standards, but always in need of more money. I thought that was strange, since people gave them a ton of money every week, and I’d just learned that none of it was taxed. At one point, I was standing nearby while the priest and a few members were talking about fundraising, and about how much money the church needed, and I suggested that we just sell off the giant golden, ruby encrusted book sleeve they kept the gospel in. Surely, God wouldn’t care if the Gospel was wrapped in gold and jewels, he would just want it to be there. I remember being laughed at for that, dismissed out of hand, and in that moment I realized that these people didn’t care about the Word, they cared about the optics.
That was the moment my faith started to wane completely. If these people that I’ve known my entire life were going to preach poverty and humility, and balk at the idea of a simple book rather than a gem encrusted one, how could I believe anything they say? How could I trust in them when they were so openly hypocritical? That is when I began questioning everything and realized that the true Love of God was rarer than I’d been preached to. More often, I saw the acts these so-called Christians called the Love of God coming from those that didn’t share their belief or hold one at all. Since then, I’ve met far worse Christians, and far better ones as well, and found that the love one has for one's god isn’t always proportional to the love they show others.
I really wanted to highlight Diego’s fears about God not loving him because he was a monster despite the fact that he puts in every effort to be the best person he can be. He is loyal, he is caring, and he is flawed, but he is, for all of the monstrous vitae flowing through his veins, a good man. Yet, despite this, he fears he is unloved by the God he devoted his life and unlife to, because he was taught his whole life that God will only love him if he was a certain way. And I very much want to say that if you are a person being told that God can’t love you for who and what you are, while being preached to that God is Love, then you’re being lied to on one front, and I think you can easily tell which one is true.
Romantic
I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to play with this kind of love because it’s very overdone in Hollywood and media as a whole. Romantic love is that love that we’re told we all want to seek and find and it will complete us. This isn’t true in the slightest, because there is so much more to life and love than romance. Your romantic partner should be your best friend, the person you would go to bat for any day of the week, that you can argue with and make up with, that you can trust with any part of your life without fail. Romance is born from this relationship being elevated to a level beyond.
It’s like Best Friend gone Super Saiyan.
One of the reasons I didn’t want to really go too deep into Romantic love was because Isadora and Grey were the obvious choice. For one, I didn’t want to write a self insert love story, and for another, they just met. Let's pick each of these apart to see why I wrote it that way anyway.
They just met: Literally, this is the whole argument. They cannot be in love. If we follow my formula of “Best Friend gone Super Saiyan,” they’re not even really friends yet, so they cannot be in love. And that was the exact reason I wanted to address it here in this chapter. See, love has to come from somewhere. Oftentimes, it's born of infatuation with someone, and I have no problem with Isadora and Grey being infatuated with one another. While I am very much a sucker for a pretty face, believe you me, Grey and Isadora are more Sapiosexual, attracted to one another’s intelligence, cleverness, and ability to think on their feet. They value traits the other shares with them, while both learning how to navigate the messier emotional side of love. Will this become a loving relationship? I honestly don’t know, if so probably not in the traditional sense. Will this become a love interest to be explored? Oh, most definitely.
Self Insert Love Story: Getting this out of the way here, self insert love stories are cringy as fuck (See Twilight). So why did I do it? Well, for one, I’m also a sucker for romantic crap. Some of my favorite movies are You’ve Got Mail, Overboard, and Just Like Heaven. (Yes, I love RomComs, fight me.) More than that, though, the reason I included the love story between the character based on me and Isadora is because Isadora is also based on me. See, Isadora represents a lot of traits I have that I do like about myself, but need to bring to the forefront more often (she is cool and collected, observant, and can plan) while also having a lot of my weaknesses that I need to address in my real life (difficulty with crowds, insecurity, fear of being used and/or abandoned, etc.). Grey is meant to represent the idealized version of my strengths, while also having a disproportionately more exaggerated level of my weaknesses. Having the two of them come together is a way for me to try to bond those traits and address my flaws… essentially, find a way to love myself. (Haha! Secret hidden fifth form of love! Self-Love! Because you cannot love another until you love yourself, right?)
Wrong.
And in a moment you’ll see why.
Platonic
This is probably the most important form of love in my life, and the one that causes me the most headaches. First of all, platonic love is a deep bond between people that is non-sexual. Despite all the sexual jokes me and my friends make (and how many people have thought me and Andrew were dating over the years) the relationship itself is deep and meaningful beyond words. I will honestly say that without my friends, I doubt I’d have made it through all these years. Beyond that, not only would the Displaced series not exist, I probably wouldn’t have played any of the games that inspired it.
They loved me at moments where I didn’t love myself (proving that “you can’t love another til you love yourself” bullshit wrong instantly), and even last night I was able to talk with one of my friends about something that had been bothering me for a very long time. There had been a weight in my chest that pressed down so hard I couldn’t breathe, but I was scared to share it. The moment I did, however, the weight was gone. Platonic love is the love that makes life worth living, because it is the kind of love that fits in all the other forms of love. Your family shares platonic love with you, your friends share platonic love with you, your religion (should) be platonic love, and even your romantic entanglements should have a majority of platonic love to be the grand, lifelong romances. Those moments of sitting on the couch, holding hands, and watching Great British Bake Off or some medical drama can be some of the greatest moments with the one you love romantically, and it is a platonic moment.
Because of this, I want to address the main reason why this chapter was “No Gurlz Allowed.” One of my biggest frustrations in media is the inherent need to sexualize everything, or at least to romanticize everything. The greatest offender in my recent memory is the movie Luca. Now, I need to preface this with the fact that I haven’t seen the movie, as I’ve been watching fewer and fewer of that type of animation as I age, but to me, it looked like a cute story between two young boys at the time of their life where they were just on the cusp of thinking about romance, but hadn’t quite gone over that hump. Instead, they were two friends on their last childhood adventure before childhood began to wane to responsibility.
And what was the first thing the internet did with it?
Gay love story.
On both ends of the spectrum. We had people who were condemning the movie for showing two little gay boys to an audience of boys, trying to “turn them gay” while you had other people claiming how it was a beautiful representation of young gay love. Then, when you talk to the creator, he was just like, “No, you’re both wrong” and then everyone got mad at him!
Listen, I am an ally. I ran the LGBTQ+ club at a high school I taught at (a group my student lovingly called “the Alphabet Mafia” since no two of them shared the same identifications), and I often said to my students that I was the facilitator, not the boss, because I couldn’t speak to their needs, I could only support their initiatives. And that is the same thing here. I understand that there is a severe lack of representation of gay love stories out there, mostly due to censorship and prejudice (one of the reasons why you’ll find more lesbian romance stories being accepted by masses than gay romances).
My problem with this representation with Luca stems from a bigger all around problem, that if solved would also go a great distance to helping solve the problem with representation of gay relationships: there is a majorly severe lack of platonic male relationships in media. And not just platonic male relationships, but healthy platonic male realtionships. Let's take a look at the male friendships in modern media, how many are healthy. Inversely, how many are built around toxic masculinity tropes? Yeah, we have a lot of male friends in media over the decades: Bevis and Butthead were male friends, and toxic as fuck. How about Doctors House and Wilson from the show House? The boys from South Park? The guys in Family Guy? The characters in countless other shows that are on television that I don’t watch anymore because I’ve moved on to other forms of media consumption?
Honestly, I can think of two places where healthy male relationships are shown with little to no sexualization of the relationship. The first is obvious: Lord of the Rings. Watch those movies, see how Aragorn treats the men in his life. See how the men in that movie cry with each other, support each other, and stand by each other. That is what peak platonic love between men should look like.
The second, comes from the show Friends. Now, I know this show gets a lot of shit for a lot of reasons (some deserved, and some very much not), but it is one of my comfort shows, a show I’ll watch to soothe my anxiety and one that taught me a lot about what friendships should look like. Specifically, the relationship between Joey and Chandler. Now, were there moments that weren’t healthy? It was a sitcom that ran for 10 years, of course there were. But the lengths those two would go to for each other, the way they stood by one another, the way they forgave each other… That was what was important.
So yes, I do recognize the lack of gay romance stories in the world, but I firmly believe if we supported male friendships, helped build healthy male friendships, and more than anything normalized men forming deep and meaningful bonds with one another, we would be able to fix both problems at once.
In the end, love is love. People will love who and how they will. And more than anything, if you feel like Diego, remember, you are worthy of love. Just also remember that not all love looks the same, not all love is healthy, and not all love is what you expect it to be.
Live life with love, and love will find you.
