It’s a stale day in late November. I’m trapped, having convinced myself that I’ve done nothing all month but wait for myself to be myself again. I’m walking with one of my close friends, someone who I just met in August upon moving into the dorms, and we’re talking about how much we like living in South Quad Residence Hall, where we’ve all become friends. Stepping off the curb to cross the street, we bump shoulders, and I smile to myself as we separate then drift back together again. She tells me, “I love you guys; you make me feel so wanted.” I nod in agreement, and she continues: “You make me feel so loved.”
Although both of the things she said resonated with me, they seemed different in some way, but I couldn’t figure out exactly how. I briefly wondered what feeling wanted meant in comparison to feeling loved, and how feeling loved related to actually being loved. We walked on.
Initially, I was worried that the long days piling up would stultify our relationship — our separate schedules keeping us just a little further apart than I would like. I was worried I’d feel like I was lacking so much without her and without my other friends, too. By her side, things felt less somber, and even if all the worry was still there it was like we shared it — less for one of us to carry alone. Months later, we still say we love each other, she and I.
Our attention to one another, as expressed, meant one sort of love. I’m thinking now of “Lady Bird,” where Sister Sarah Joan, a nun, lofted a question that has sat with me for quite some time: “Don’t you think maybe they’re the same thing, love and attention?”
In the film, love and attention were presented as two concepts that could be intertwined, like loving and wanting. Being wanted and having someone’s attention doesn’t necessitate love, but it would be hard to find the two separately. This overlap is evident in media, where love and want are constantly paired even when it’s not directly expressed. But what need is there to separate love from want, and what purpose would it serve to pull them apart? How would we go about doing so? Arguably, love may have to be far from blind. But the base for longing and wanting are innate, unruly and insatiable. Nonetheless, I would vehemently defend that love without want does not make love any less genuine or real. It is possible — and sometimes easy — to love deeply without much want or desire.
He wants me, he wants me not
My lips burn from tea that’s too hot as tears streak my cheeks. Sitting at my desk, I told my roommate about a boy I was friends with that I really liked, certain that he didn’t like me the same way. She sighed heavily — she’d heard this story before. She wasn’t fond of this guy, and I wasn’t sure if I really had reason to be, either. I told her I had no idea if I actually liked him, or if I just wanted him to want me. Perhaps this is a familiar dilemma, or perhaps it just sounds painfully girlish.
I was upset with myself, practically shaking my head, thinking of how all-consuming this little crush became, feeling so stupid for how it affected me. I tell myself it’s possible I loved him the way I told her I do. At the same time, it was plain to me that I was in love with the idea of him wanting me, not even having to love me. I was obsessed with this idea, I think, not him.
Fixations like this, I have found, tend to be the product of needing to feel wanted, to be seen as desirable, wanting to shift one’s own position from being the musician to the muse — from being the one wanting to the one wanted. I would do my best to take care of him, I told her, because I’d want him to do the same for me. I’d want him to want to do the same for me.
I would say, I love love. And I do, but I have come to realize this relates to a need to be seen and cared about. Some relationships seem to serve as an exchange, a sort of mutualism of wanting and needing; but wanting and loving don’t require reciprocity, though it may be an underlying plea. I would rather have something to hold on to, never myself being held, than be left clinging to nothing. I suppose I’m open to the idea of someone growing to love me, but it’s much harder to believe in someone really wanting me.
On New Year’s Eve at midnight, my roommate and I ate grapes under a table, a ritual meant to bring the grape-eater luck in their love life in the new year. We wanted to be wanted.
Spilling over
Loving can be momentarily fulfilling, but the mess seems to come when it gets all tangled up with longing — a feeling that captures both loving and wanting, wanting something because you love it. It mixes with grief: saying goodbye to a friend not knowing when or if you’ll see each other again, trying hopelessly to hold onto days slipping by, wondering how the person on your mind all the time can not care for you the same way.
I remember standing at a table, pen in hand, crying frightfully as I tried to write a story about a woman I barely knew at her memorial party. On the table, there was a big box, the instructions tell us why you love her scribbled onto the side of it, adorned with some smiley faces. I talked to her maybe once, which left me feeling sort of out of place at this open house, attended by much of her family. But when confronted with that command I had a sort of outpouring onto the notecard I was given, realizing that I somehow absolutely did love her. There was a crazy thunderstorm, and of course everyone at the party insisted that it was her presence, her soul in the sky sending us rain, and that day, love seemed funny — loving someone meant seeing a storm and having it remind you of their spirit, calling it the product of their strength, thinking it’s an outcry to anyone still listening. That day, I wanted to be able to see her in what was around me; I guess I realized how much I wanted her back.
A lingering love
I felt about the same in mid-July after leaving New York City, where I’d stayed for a couple weeks, surrounded by people entirely new to me, their homes far from mine. I spent much of those days writing; it was a journalism program that had brought me to the city in the first place. Every spare moment I had, though, I traveled around with a small group of new friends, going out to eat, playing soccer in the park, taking photos, being tourists and finding our way.
It really wasn’t made more special by knowing how limited our time together was. We were busy enough — settled into each other enough, I think — that I routinely forgot about the deadline of our new found relationships. I couldn’t figure it out, the way I was attached to these people; I told myself I had never felt that way about anyone before. During that bit of summer, divided somehow from all that was ahead, we had only hope, its wringing hands and silent promises and aching. I thought, maybe from a distance, we would have less to dread. And weren’t we going to see each other again when we decided to hang on?
My last day there, it was my birthday. They made me a card. In it, one of them wrote, I’ll never forget you, I promise. I was struck by the way this spoke to my insecurities; it was exactly what I had wanted to know and something I had needed confirmed. I needed to know she wouldn’t forget me, and needed her not to. I needed to be wanted, and I think I was in love — that’s the only way I could explain it to my parents and friends concerned with how I was distraught when I returned home, to get them to take me seriously. It was gloomy. I think I was in love.
I don’t know what that means, but I know it means a lot. I miss her so much it hurts.
I wish it could go without saying that there’s more to love than just wanting. There were certainly times when I could go without feeling like there was a part of me missing, something or someone I had to find to pour myself into in order to be complete: Not something to look for or something to wait for. I can’t define it. In all that I’ve just unraveled it’s a bit more clear, at least to my eyes. Love is in being wanted, in listening, in the city, in patience, in desperation and always in exit wounds.
Statement Columnist Evelyn Brodeur can be reached at enbrod@umich.edu.