Journal
February 14, 2026
The best Valentine’s Day ever was back in the fourth grade. It was 1981 and I had stopped by my girlfriend’s house to pick her up so that we could walk the last two blocks together. There was safety in numbers. A man was known to tool around the school slowly in an old, light blue Buick. He’d wave girls over to his car with his pants unzipped.
We weren’t scared of him. He was just one more disgusting boy we knew as far as we were concerned.
We all had made our Valentine’s Day mailboxes from boxes that our parents had used a serrated knife on to make a lid. We had decorated our little mailboxes and stayed up way past our regular bedtimes to sign 32 Valentines that we would distribute later that day.
That afternoon I got one Valentine card that wasn’t signed. It was from “your secret crush” and although I didn’t know that I had a secret crush until that moment, reading the words made me blush. I spent the whole night wondering who he could be, who I hoped he was and when he would make himself known.
The only thing in the world better than new love is a secret crush. New love is to secret crush what passion is to forbidden love. It’s an analogy that will burn your house down all around you and you will not give the tiniest of fucks as long as you’re there with your lover.
When something is forbidden, the brain enters a state of heightened conflict between desire and control. Forbidden objects are treated by the brain with the same level of importance as personal possessions. The brain assigns higher value to forbidden items, making them harder to resist because they became more mentally salient.
Shakespeare knew how to turn up the heat in prose. The Capulets and Montagues were sworn enemies but Romeo could have been just another teenage dirt bag with acne and a perpetual hard on. The stars were aligned; or misaligned, and a secret crush became life and death.
A new version of Wuthering Heights came out yesterday in theaters. It’s very apropos that it actually opened on Friday the 13th. Heathcliff and Catherine take unlucky at love to Fatal Attraction limits. Can we get another boiled rabbit here, please?
Affairs of the heart aren’t always described in Hallmark card prose. Sometimes a box of candy turns to poison, adoration for one quickly becomes obsession. Claude Frollo, the tragic priest in The Hunchback of Notre Dame might have coined it best when he said, “If you know what my love for you is! It is fire; it is molten lead; it is a thousand daggers in my heart.”
Then again, Taylor Swift says, “Boys only want love if it’s torture. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Secret love buoys up your spirit and makes you fierce. Humans are at their best when they’re in love, and we are our most loyal selves to the ones that we hold in our hearts. Maybe especially when that’s the only place that we can hold them.
The power of love can’t be contained or harnessed by any other outside force. I think the best example of this is the actual definition of Valentine’s Day. Like love, the day might be steeped in overpriced flowers and dipped in chocolate, but it started with blood.
Emperor Claudius II declared war on love in a manner in which our current administration would love to take credit for. Roman soldiers were forbidden to marry in the 3rd century because the emperor wanted all of that passion, all of that power, to be used in service of the Roman army.
Saint Valentine became a martyr for love before the rest of us did on Tinder. He married Roman soldiers in secret and died for it, never renouncing his faith. He was put to death on February 14th. The final, most delicious piece is this: Pope Gelasius I declared February 14th as a holiday to remember him once the Church took power. However, it wasn’t to celebrate love as much as it was to replace the pagan fertility festival of Lupercalia. Even more than your money or your voting rights, the government has always wanted to control sex and love.
My lover will be here in a few hours. This man knows every inch of my body like his favorite song and yet, once outside of my apartment, there is no “we”. We only exist in breath, in the touch of fingers and the sound of sighs. We only live in candlelight and shadows. We are more poetry and lyrics and moonlight reflections than anything substantial like joint bank accounts or same last names.
It’s almost as good as a mystery Valentine.
February 7, 2026
The first time I thought that I had fallen in love, I was eighteen and he was a man who, I now know, knew much better.
We had kissed once on a dare, right there in his office. I was still giggly and adorable about sexual harassment. I thought I knew everything about men just because I had boys wrapped around my finger. My skirt was too short and my hopes were too high. We skipped lunch and went straight to a hotel, which was better for my diet anyway.
He was the first man who had ever told me that I was funny or interesting. For a girl who had only been noticed for her looks, that was like double fudge brownies. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed and he wrote poetry. He really knew music and he could smoke a joint and still sound as grownup as I wanted to be.
He could cum from going down on me and I hoped that we could stay under the paper thin, shitty hotel sheets forever.
I would dreamily write my first name and his last name in bubble letters on my summer school homework. Or, I did, until his wife came over one sticky August afternoon and very kindly explained that was actually her last name. I stared at the outline of her bellybutton, her round, pregnant belly pushed the boundary between us.
The 54-year old me sees that 18-year old girl now and holds her close. She takes all of the snotty Kleenex the girl wads up as she sobs inconsolably about how he was the one. She also takes her Marlboro Lights when she’s not looking and whispers, “Don’t smoke and don’t waste one second of your life on a married man. You’ll thank me later.” And 54-year old me puts her fabulous sunglasses on and smirks once she’s down the hall.
Kids.
But, according to the theory of relativity, 6-year old me is also somewhere, still sitting on the couch in her tutu and rain boots, waiting for another man that never showed up either.
You never love the same way twice. Every love you have breaks you and shapes you into something new. When you’re eighteen and shiny and expect love to be butterfly kisses and jumping in puddles, you hear that and you close your eyes and feel the sun on your face and wait to be cocooned in rapture.
Then you have them. Their eyes are on you and the heart that beats in perfect time with yours and you have the shivers when you touch. You finish each other’s sentences and you smell them in your clothes and you call yourself a “we” in conversation. Plural other half of my whole Everything.
And then it breaks.
Anxious attachment is love’s hillbilly cousin. The shifty one. The one who was still a senior in high school and had a mustache and a part-time job at Burger King until his girlfriend got pregnant. Love is shattered like a crystal vase. Obsession stays up all night chain smoking and punching holes in the wall because his voicemail is full.
We’re all the monster in someone’s story. There have been breakthroughs for all of us in the hurricane’s wake of a breakup. Your life, scattered, in search of survivors. People have done great things with heartbreak. In fact, one could say that almost everything that we consider culture had its beginnings in the end of someone’s sad love story. Take me back, I’ll paint you a chapel ceiling. I’ll build you a castle. I’ll discover you a new land.
I’ll be good.
One day, after you’ve stopped eating ice cream and hit the gym, you’ll realize that you haven’t scanned for their car, their jacket, their social media posts. The neural pathway healed. Your inner golden retriever is wagging his tail again. Want to go outside boy?
Then you glance up and make first time eye contact from across the room. The lingering look that you are officially too old to pretend that you don’t know exactly what that means. Then there’s the kiss. The brush of lips, warm, lingering, no tongue yet. Wait for it.
It tastes inevitable.
And the 54-year old you lets out a little chuckle when you’re driving home thinking about how great he is. Because she’s been around the block, although 35-year old you thinks this is why 54’s not married.
He’s just a man, sweetheart, she tells you with a sigh. Just another man. The 40-year old you is too busy reading work emails to know what’s going on. But yeah, men, whatever. 23-year old you is humming something that sounds like, “Friday, I’m in Love.”
Yes, 6-year old me, take your boots off, it’s just another man.
If you never love the same way twice, then this is a brand new me. This brush of skin on skin that sends shivers down my spine has never happened before. These eyes on mine that see all the way inside must see the old scars too. The missing places. The places that are still a little tender to the touch.
No matter how many times, the ride is worth every minute. And all of the versions of me are still very excited.
