letter eleven: a thousand reasons

a little rigmarole about love stories

Dearest friend,

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this to you, but I have never fallen in love. 

That isn’t to say I’ve never loved anything or anyone, or never had relationships that I consider love. I’m not much of a social butterfly to begin with, by choice and by nature, and like I told you before, I’m not entirely sure how I’ve even made friends or endeared myself to enough people to receive as much warmth and generosity as I do in multiple avenues of my life. When I think of relationships, I think of friendships, at times even of acquaintances and strangers who have surprised me day to day with their kindness, and so romance — that is, romantic love, not the romance you can learn to find in life and everything in it, all other versions of love included — was at first a non-interest, and now a non-factor, in my personal life.

In high school, worried that my friends will think my complicated feelings about a girl I met online were theirs to discuss the way that details of everyone’s love lives were mandatory public property in teenagehood, I picked out my math class seatmate from a mental lineup and decided it wouldn’t be so bad to have him as my go-to name whenever someone got a bit too excited asking if I had a crush on anyone. That’s how I thought about it then — that I could like him, curly hair and similar tastes in media and deadpan humour, and so I must and would. This kind of thing in itself isn’t uncommon; I know plenty of people who managed to trick themselves into genuinely falling for another person by fixating on a single detail, and I know much of the headiness of a crush is the simplicity of developing it and nursing it. A bare bones idea takes very little to fester once it’s planted, and that is especially true for simple crushes. You tell yourself you’re interested, and that very act of self-confiding is as good a start as actual interest. Liking people romantically was like that for me at seventeen. A matter of method acting, like a story I started spinning to appease or entertain the people whose interest I thought meant closeness between us, only for me to develop investment in keeping it going because a story is still a story even when you’re your own protagonist.

Over these last few years, people have tried to psychoanalyze my relationship with romantic love. Some have understandably tried to nudge me towards examining if maybe I don’t actually like men and had used how easy it is to perform liking them to process my queerness away from my friends’ interrogation. Others have said I project my parents’ own lack of romantic love for each other, the performativity of their marriage and barely existent parenting, and that has informed my inability to truly fall in love. A few pointed out that maybe I just haven’t met the right match, that I am so caught up in my work and my interests that I forget to involve actual human beings in those. If my life was a story, any of these would have made for predictable characterization. But I hadn’t really found any of those completely fair, a decade later. 

The older I become, the more I’m realizing that it might not be a case of waiting for the right person to come around or waiting to heal enough from childhood before I can let someone in, but simply that it just doesn’t… happen. While I am capable of feeling physical attraction and can act on them more than fine, I’ve never related to friends with benefits that fall for their partner or less defined relationships that lead inevitably to real dating, because I know from experience that you can drag me around in dynamics like that and I won’t budge. There are people I am incredibly fond of, and people I will happily do things for and spend time with, but the love that people seem to talk about, that specific romance that marks it different from platonic love? It’s a total stranger to me. I have less fingers in one hand than friends who have ended up confessing romantic love, and each time I am certain, despite all the love I have for them, that I will never reciprocate what they feel.

I don’t think anything’s wrong with me. It’s never been a matter of that. Mostly, I’m just tired of having to logicalize it, and exasperated at best about any attempts by the people around me to label it. I am totally certain that I have no parameters at all on who I can be attracted to, and that I can keep up with that level of emotion no matter how intense or briefly exclusive they need me to be. I know how it is to want someone, and to want someone wanting you, and I know how it is to adore someone so much that if they ask me to drop everything in my schedule tomorrow and go see the aurora borealis way up north, I would. I have had people like that, and continue to. People of all types, people I want to keep in my life for as long as they’ll want to be in it. I don’t consider it a lack that it will never be anything more. To do so would be a disservice to how deeply fond I am of the loved ones I do have nonetheless, it feels like. Who is this hypothetical soulmate to come and demand the highest spot in the hierarchy only because my relationship with them might have the label of romance or significant other or spouse? Who are you to say you are the most important person to me, to the point that I will choose you unconditionally over everyone else? What does that say about the other people I have chosen to love and care about, that I can so easily set them aside in the priority pyramid?

But I get it. Or rather I get what I don’t get. I get that I don’t get whatever it is that romantic love does to the brain, the level of devotion it inspires, the irrationality and intensity that seems specific to it, nor do I know firsthand how romantic love can hurt or soothe or save or break a heart. I am, at best, an observer to all of it. I don’t lose sleep over any desire to be loved like that in the first place, and I see romance the same way I see languages: lovely, messy, at times cannibalistic, at times the only thing that allows you to keep functioning in a society that feels foreign, intricate and nuanced and ever-evolving, yet it is its very nature that makes me certain I will never, ever consider myself fluent in any variation of it.

I love languages, though. Not as a graduate of the degree that I have, but as a person who loves something in the way you only can after you’ve formed a relationship with it that is tailored specifically to you. It didn’t click for me until a Latin professor in university decided the best way for our class of five people to learn is to ban translations from our learning altogether: we’ll use a mid-level story collection all in Latin instead of a grammar textbook, will have homework and tests and exams with everything from the date slots to the instructions in Latin, and while it will seem foreign and painful at first to not be allowed to look up meanings for the words we don’t know or not be told how a grammatical construction we haven’t seen before functions until we reach the end of the passage of that chapter — we were promised that eventually it wouldn’t be. At some point something will click and it will become seamless, the language learning, even if it’s for a language that’s been dead and ostensibly obsolete for so much longer than current human civilization has even been a thing. And we accepted it because after all, is it really learning a language if all you are learning is how to make that language fit into another one you know better? 

That professor was right, at least for my case. I know it’s likely not a method that works for everyone, but I also know that whether or not I knew it back then, this is the exact same method I learned English through. And if I had to pick now which languages I know best — if best means most intimately, most intuitively — it would be this and Latin. Both of them comfortable and lightweight on me, a product of what observation and absorption can do for my affection and passion towards something. None of the where is the bathroom? or 100 most common words in this language memorization (no less interesting and valuable yet tedious and un-stimulating) but a headfirst dive into what words can do in that language, plus an illogical amount of trust that at some point a section of my brain will shift a few places over and I will understand what I need to without worrying about what I don’t. 

My relationship with romance is a little like that, I’ve found. Despite it all, I love watching romantic love unfold when it’s done right. I can’t conceive of a story without it, and even in the most unlikely of genres, if there is romance, I will spare it a second of curiosity at minimum. I certainly don’t value it above other kinds of dynamics; it’s not the most important type for me at all, and even a story centering a romantic relationship ideally only ever reflects the established dynamics of those two characters with everyone else around them. At least in the context of fiction, romance doesn’t invent who we are. It doesn’t make us into anything. It’s popular to claim that we are different people in different languages, and for some that might be true, but I personally think that we are who we are, full stop, and it’s only that we’re able to articulate different parts of ourselves in the facilities afforded to us by different languages. It’s not like that part magically disappears in another language; you quite literally just don’t have the words or tones or vocal register to express it externally in the same way.

Someone’s experiences with romance does the same, at least in my eyes. In real life and in stories, be-all end-all romance is not the beginning of who we will become, but rather just another constantly repeating beginning that reveals the person that other things have already made us into — our families, our friends, our failures and our losses and our joys and our desires. My theory is that this is why romance feels so important for so many. Because in a lot of ways, it is the ultimate form of all the other loves we have or have not received prior to entering a romantic relationship. No one ever enters into that kind of vulnerability without baggage. Whether you want it to or not, whether it succeeds or it ends, real, deeply etched romance reveals who you are, what you want, what you need, and in doing so, will reveal the kind of life you’ve lived so far. 

If a different language is a lens that focuses and refocuses who we are, romance is closer in my eyes to a melting pot. It’s where everything ends up. It’s where everything gets dumped into. It’s where everything is forced to clump or congeal or blend together. Some might find that a cynical thought for me to voice, but watching people fall in and out of love is for me the thing that clarifies what it means to be a human being moving through the world. I don’t consider that cynical at all. I love writing romance. It’s often the most fun I ever have in writing, even if I would say my love stories are rarely just about the process of falling in love. Again — falling in love is the final step. It’s positioned in the finish line to serve as the inciting incident for unravelling everything else before and ahead and around it, in order to lead to a new beginning at the end of this one story. I love it for that. 

I also know that I only get to say that as a detached observer rather than a participant in real-life romantic love, and I won’t deny that I often write about love like I would about a psychological condition like grief and long-term resentment, with the kind of clinical examination you have to learn to hone when you’re in the business of having to dissect something alive. Still, though. Learning to write romance is the very foundation of what makes my love for storytelling what it is now. I want to say this means that believing in the kinds of love possible between two human beings also serves as the very foundation of the most sincere love I can offer people even at their most stupid and most reckless. 

But all of this waxing poetic is just to preface the fact that in the last month, my primary method of escapism has been romance webtoons. When I say I’ve been reading a lot of them — My friend, I mean a lot. There was one week where both my screen time and sleep deprivation were at an all-time high purely because I couldn’t stop the curiosity from mutating into a compulsion to keep reading more and more. My high school Korean has had to be resuscitated from death once I ran out of promising titles that have been translated or were legally available outside of their original sites. I used a $200 gift card that a kind Apple Store worker had given me for reasons still unbeknownst to me… on buying webtoon chapters in bulk. Every song, every quote, every waking thought is attributable to a different webtoon. Sure, I’ve had more questionable fixations, but the banality of this particular obsession gives it an extra ridiculous kick, if you ask me.

Some webtoons have been more questionable than others in their approach to what makes a relationship, while some have just been forgettable, or too indulgent to linger, and yet no two, somehow, despite the number I’ve read, have been in any way similar. I have sooner encountered overlap between two names than the stories each separate character belongs to, and it’s just — It’s mindblowing to me. I’ve gone from a high school love story that isn’t at all how it seemed from that premise, and a high school love story that is everything it seemed from that premise. I’ve touched genres I never would have otherwise, and discovered an author that has reignited my own love for writing big stories about small lives. I’ve dropped stories at the first hint of a love triangle, and stuck with more than sixty chapters just for a hint of movement in a slow burn narrative. I have felt homicidal over red flag behaviours in relationships that aren’t mine, and wept when a character who will grow up to be a taciturn sculptor was accused of killing a rabbit he had carried around and treasured so much that he had tried to make his own from mud and clay as a small child, starting him down the path that will lead him to his main love language as an adult. 

Like — It’s bad. The fever of the overfixation has mellowed out since, and is definitely on the way to dying down, but it was almost a genuine addiction at one point, as if I couldn’t go on unless I ensure my next high off seeing how the hell the next webtoon will spin its own approach to love and intimacy and all the things that might ensure or fail our understanding of it. I’m sure these authors are just writing for the sake of fulfilling their own hopes for these characters, which in itself is a writing approach I respect above all, but for a while there, I was close to feral realizing there were so, so many ways for romance to unfold that defies sticking to one genre altogether. Accidental ghosthunting partners, both of whom might be children of the mythological underworld? Boyfriends now, because why not. A guy who gains the ability to come back from death and power up as he does in a fantasy world? Gets a whole arc dedicated to meeting, falling in love and finding a way to beg the powers that be for a happy ever after with his would-be wife. 

It’s like someone left me in an archival library of every kind of romance story there is and set me loose with no restrictions to what I can and can’t read, for better or for worse. I tried a casino gambling webtoon and got burnt by its central relationship, but surprised myself when a couple of revenge stories ended up having two of my favourite dynamics. And while my primary takeaway is a newfound clarity regarding the kind of people and relationships I haven’t tried writing myself but would love to, another prominent thought has been — What does it take, really, for someone to fall in love? What decides which type of love it’s going to be? Is it all up to chance? And when you fall in love, do you really fall for that person, or do you fall in love with the things they bring into your life — the joy, the giddiness, sometimes even the anxiety, or the thrill, all these things that make a different version of you possible? When the latter happens, are you really falling for another person, or falling for another you that their presence serves as a catalyst to?

There’s a panel in the webtoon Truth or Dare where a character says, “If you find one reason to like someone, you’ll have a thousand more in just three days.” It’s been sitting with me since. I guess I’ve kind of visualized falling in love this whole time as a gradual process. Love at first sight, I thought, really is just koi no yokan — that sensation of seeing someone for the first time and knowing, at the very least, that you will fall in love with them someday. I thought that was incredibly romantic. That premonition, and in that, this inevitability. What’s more romantic than believing in possibility so strong that it’s essentially set in stone? And to apply that to falling in love, when you are yet to know this person, but with time, with knowing, the love will grow, sure as the transition from one season to the next. 

And yet webtoons have grabbed me by the throat and said, Wrong. Shut the hell up. Who cares about having to know someone to love them? What if you fall in love with just one act? With just one small thing? You don’t have to know someone’s name to love them. To which I argued, Why does it have to be romantic love, then? Can’t someone lend me change and for me to be enamoured with them in, like, a “do you wanna be friends” way? And webtoons — because they’re a collective, haunting entity in the back of my mind now — spat on me, kicked me in the stomach, grabbed me by the hair and hissed, Every story of romantic love begins with an act of romanticizing, and there’s nothing easier to romanticize than a small detail or a throwaway moment in the past! A meet-cute! Secretly knowing each other from decades ago! A tiny act of kindness! For some people, a friendship is just a beginning! You don’t actually fall in love with the act! You fall in love with what that small act leaves with you, that small sensation, and it snowballs into more because you let it! It snowballs into more because you let the intrusive thought stick around until it’s living in your mind! It snowballs into more because you keep thinking about it! That’s what leads to that kind of love! The process of making romanticization into romance!

None of them actually said anything this explicitly philosophical, except maybe Truth or Dare coming close at one point because that’s just how the dialogue in that story worked, but the whole abstract concept of webtoons might as well have relayed this to me in one united, disembodied voice that I only parsed in a dream after going four days without sleep and crashing. Suddenly, I am looking at every romantic relationship I encounter in fiction as if I only gained full consciousness yesterday, thinking about how so many good relationships are rooted in at least one half being the first person to show the other warmth or care, or maybe the first to address them in some capacity that they aren’t used to being on the receiving end of. Both cases rely on novelty, or on possibility, or at least the high of knowing there is someone out there different from what you’ve always known. Other stories show characters falling in love with their would-be partners for a quality that they would possess with or without a significant other, and that, I keep ruminating on, because is that rooted in a need to fully embrace, to the point of possession, something we find attractive or endearing or valuable in another person? 

I really did mean it, when I wondered why friendship wouldn’t be enough. I wasn’t saying that to be obtuse; I really don’t know why in this case. I don’t have an answer, either, for whether the nature of romantic love really just happens to be falling in love with the you that another person makes possible or if the real romance inherent in stories of romantic love lies in a small act of care from a stranger whom you might not have noticed otherwise. Someone bumping into you in the rain on a truly horrible day and lending you an umbrella, or a kid from the same neighbourhood pushing you out of the way of a car only for you two to be separated across two continents in the twenty years that follow, untethered except for that life-saving moment. Wouldn’t that reframe your own position in the world, for even a second? That moment of connection, where all the butterfly effects in your separate lives overlap for a second, such that even this tiny interaction must hold some modicum of inevitability to it as well. So I don’t blame people for falling in love with the first person to want to protect them, whether from bullies or from literal loan sharks, or falling in love with the first person who seems like they might want to fall in return. Maybe every instance of wanting to love only ever circles back to wanting to be loved. There’s no shame in that, and this isn’t me looking down on how self-focused love is in the end. I’ve always considered love selfish, because to do so, I felt, is to acknowledge that its innate selfishness is to the point that it circles back around to become selflessness anyway. That’s what I mean when I say romantic love reveals. It takes what we want to give and what we want to receive, no matter how disproportionate the two amounts might be, and threads both together. If such a love is available to you, then you don’t get more human than who the capacity for this type of love makes you.

No wonder people are so afraid to be vulnerable in romantic love. No wonder people either lean towards too jaded or too naive, rarely anything in between. And it’s sobering in a good way — a really, really good way — how little I understand the brain and heart functions that allow romantic love to be possible, and yet I feel so much aching tenderness for it, and for the people who feel it and participate in it, if only because to me it’s a little like navigating a small multiverse of its own, just for something or someone to call your own, and that something or someone, more often than not, ends up being yourself first and foremost.

It really has become quite a marvel the more I stew on it, that if you find one reason to like someone, if that seed has room to be planted, you will have a thousand more reasons in a matter of time once you allow yourself that momentum. Self-engineered illusion or delusion some of that attachment might be, but the fact that it’s possible at all to trip yourself into falling for someone leaves me with a lot to think over.

Then again, I also know that sometimes there is a hollowness in your life that has gone unaddressed for too long, and for plenty of people, that hollowness is in the shape of a person. 

Or maybe — sometimes, having a fully fleshed-out human presence in your life, one that in your eyes is deserving of love and attention, is what it will take to remind you that you are one in someone else’s life as well.

I do understand that much. 

The language-romance comparison works on that front, too, in the sense that Latin is a dead dead language. It has no use to me: I will never have a job that will require me to speak Latin, and at best it’s been an interesting point of conversation with job interviewers. And yet Latin has broadened the scope of English for me, has expanded the possibilities of the sound and rhythm of my writing, has taught me the weight of each English word that I took for granted before my brain had been able to map out its etymological ancestors with one glance. Latin has also made Romantic languages an unbelievable breeze; if they were easy to learn before, that’s nothing compared to how it feels to read entirely in those languages now. It’s like a new layer of the world has opened up for me, and no, I will never have to actually participate in it except to funnel what I can from the understanding it gives me of the layer that I do live in every day, but that’s worth an irreplaceable amount in grasping things that might feel too unfathomable otherwise.

Good romance is like that. I will never be fluent in it. It isn’t a requirement, a prerequisite nor a career-making benefit. It will likely never be mine, though who’s to say with the translucence of defining love in the first place. But in moments where it blinks into relevance in my life, it is always to illuminate, to connect some kind of revelation to another, to highlight all the interpersonal connections you carry with you each day you live a little more, to remind me of the things that people will be willing to do for others in the name of something as elusive to me as “love.” 

Unless it’s my best friend calling me at 3 A.M. to tell me he slept with the ex-boyfriend who broke up with him a week ago. At that point the only part illuminating in my brain is a thirst for both verbal and physical violence.

Anyway. I honestly just wanted to rant to you about how these webtoons are driving me to insanity, but I’m also probably starting to go loopy from not writing proper romance in a hot minute and struggling with how to rewrite an entire romantic dynamic in an already finished manuscript. But romance is romance, writing is writing, fun is fun, and I trust these three to always find a way to intersect. 

Life is a bit crazy at the moment otherwise, a descriptor I don’t use lightly — but it’s through no one’s fault but my own, at the end of the day. So we are hanging in there. I hope you are, too. I know I haven’t written to you in a while, and although I won’t promise I’ll be able to make up this month for those last letters missed, I do promise to try. 

Until then, I wish you more than enough love in your life — whether fictional or real life, whether romantic or platonic or whatever else — to tide you by one day to the next this October. 

Your huckleberry friend,

Sha