My playwriting teacher once said “write what you know.” The way she said it implied that knowing something can be separate from experiencing it. Of course, these two things are usually paired, and it is easy to call out writers that are working well outside of their experience and doing it poorly (see attached: my favorite thing on the internet). But, the rarer and more frustrating situation is one I find myself in now—experiencing something without knowing it, and therefore being unable to communicate it. You see, even that sentence is kind of nonsense.
I don’t know how to write about love. One of my closest childhood friends got engaged this week, two of my cast-mates had their significant others fly in and stay with us, it’s spring; love is on the brain, I just can’t seem to find a way to write about it coherently. It’s possible I have nothing to say. I have been in one real relationship and as much as I tried to fight the impulse, when he said I love you the first time I said thank you. For most of 2021, I was thinking myself in and out of love with someone I would never be in a relationship with…I revisited a journal entry from this time thinking it would shed light on my feelings, but I literally just described a location and what the moon looked like.
One of the fan favorite lines of our Much Ado belongs to Benedick. In the fallout of the disastrous first wedding, as Beatrice grieves her cousin’s jilting, Benedick blurts out: “I do love nothing in the world so well as you—is not that strange?” The crowd goes wild. A couple scenes later, on shaky but less charged ground, he says, “Suffer love! A good epithet. I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.” It’s kind of a burn, but it’s true. Beatrice and Benedick make more sense to me than many of the other Shakespeare couples. They describe their love, when they can admit to it, as horrible, spiteful, strange, requited, yielding, giddy. They contradict themselves constantly in an attempt to name, refute, or accept whatever it is between them. It’s very fun to play. I will miss being a person who loves and is loved in such a discordant way.
A friend of mine has a theory about love that once got him in trouble at a dinner party. The theory, which is sound in my opinion, is that every relationship holds every type of love—romantic, sexual, parental, etc.—to varying degrees. (I think he would have gotten less pushback if he didn’t start by saying that all friendships are romantic; everyone at the dinner thought he was harboring a secret tendre for them.) The degree can even be negative. For example, barring the Lannisters, people usually feel negative erotic feelings towards family members, not indifference. I am lucky that my closest friendships are emotionally intimate and in many ways romantically fulfilling. However, this also means that I don’t really know what I’m talking about when I talk about love in this other, distinct but familiar, way. And I would push back against love being a “know it when you feel it” thing. I would categorize it as “feel it when you feel it,” as maybe all the best things are.
There is a really beautiful line at the end of one of my favorite books: “It seems to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life.” There are seconds onstage when some alchemical process takes place and I am no longer an actor saying lines; there are flashes when I am struck by divinity in the world; there are moments when I am in love. All of these experiences are equally unknowable to me. They are instances of an ember sparked into radiance.
I have now referenced Reddit, The Princess Bride, Shakespeare, a friend, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead in my ramblings on love, which means it is high time to end this. To quote myself last, two years ago I tried to write about my quarantine experience, reading it again, it sums up my thoughts on love nicely:
There are moments when I am full. I feel my whole body burn from some deeply inner incandescent space. These are followed by such intense emptinesses that I have to question whether the fullness ever really existed in the first place. Am I sure I just didn’t read it in a book somewhere? Or lucid dream it? I am full now. Of impossible philosophical things that float and melt like candy floss. So full, so teeth-sticky without anything to show for it. Just a lurid pink tongue.
Please feel free to lend some wisdom.
Mia, it will happen when you least expect it, and when it does the words will flow from you like a running stream. I can't wait for you to find love and then write about it because you truly have a way with words. Love ya