Think you have some tiny idea of how love works?
No, when you’re single and you’ve finally made it past the age when you’ve felt both love’s deepest tongue probings and also its most random horror-flick slashings, past the age when getting moronically drunk every weekend and hooking up is the ultimate goal and you’ve had enough sex to fill a thousand porn movies and everyone around you is no longer on some sort of giddy, wide-eyed first-adult-relationship must-get-married must-have-babies track of impossibly optimistic utopian desire, what it means, at least for me, is that you get to become this odd sort of sounding board — a blank slate of love’s warped potential, a reason for others to extrapolate on the nature of love and life and sex and how goddamn difficult/wonderful/impossible it all really is.
Which is merely another way of saying, I am learning something. Or rather, re-learning. Or rather, having something everyone sort of knows but no one really talks all that much about because it’s so damn obvious and also painful and fraught and wonderful, pounded back into my thick skull in a delightfully unexpected way.
Here is the big lesson, the thing that keeps coming at me, again and again and again: No one has the slightest clue how to make love work.