Love through the eyes of a hopeless romantic

Contributor Sora Al-Baghdadi waxes poetically about the beauty in the pain of yearning for a love that she’s still yet to uncover. 

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Because love can burn like a cigarette

And leave you with nothing

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It's all so stupid. Ugh. 

Looking around campus, all I see is loving couples. Hand in hand strolling, sneaking loving looks between tuts, and whispering god-knows what in crowded rooms. It's all so sickening. 

I suppose part of it is because I entered uni with the promise that this is where real love is meant to find you. That I’m going to sit in class and the exact epitome of my type is going to sit beside me. He’d look deep into my eyes and I’d just know that this is the person for me. His smile would be soft as I drone on during the routinely ice-breaker section of the semester, and from then on we’d be inseparable.

Rather, I’ve been here for a year, with ZERO prospects. In fact, if I'm going to be completely honest… there were never any prospects. Perchance, that is the reason I held onto the hope of a uni love so tightly. I yearn to be yearned for. Long to be sought after. To experience a bond which, at my grown age (of 19), I have never experienced.

So when I look around at every doe-eyed, star-struck pair, and the lack of potential love interests, I'm faced with a jarring question: am I already too late?

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A wise woman (Lara Jean from To All The Boys I've Loved Before) once said, “For every first I’m having with him, he already has his… with her”.

Whenever I make a new friend and we reach that point in the relationship where we get to exchange the lore of our love lives, I sit and listen to their long-winded tales. Filled with adventure, heartache, rage, sorrow, and happiness. Story after story where I get to live vicariously through another. 

Then they get to me, and I hit them with, “Plot twist… I’ve never actually been in a relationship.” Every time I watch as their gaze fills with a mixture of pity, concern and slight confusion. Followed by, “Oh cool!” 

It's not cool, but it is okay to admit that.

In all honesty, the number of times this has happened to me is quite shocking. I was under the impression we were in a loneliness epidemic where no one was in a relationship. Every time I hop onto TikTok, without fail, there’s always one girl mentioning how she's never been in a relationship. And every time the girl continues and explains why she's been single for so long, it makes complete sense. The reasons all consist of similar things: religion, lust over love, dudes suck, and ‘I haven’t found the right one yet.’

Notice how I specified that I always see a ‘girl’ talking about the subject… 

Maybe it's because guys just don't share their lack of game, or maybe it's because there are significantly more females than males. But a part of me wonders if it's more than that. Especially because looking at IRL vs Online, it's hard to find people, let alone a dude, who haven’t been in a relationship by the time they're in uni. 

So I speak on behalf of everyone who hasn’t been in a relationship when I say this: Are we missing something? Are we the problem? Or is it more than that? 

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Why do you always leave me aching

When you were never mine for the taking?

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As I continue to speak about this, I want to make it clear that the demographic I am exposed to and that I’m referring to is Sydney, primarily the West. Unless I'm talking about social media, that's different.

When reflecting on relationships within the era we live in, there are a few reasons why there is an apparent lack in relationships. Rather than focusing on lasting relationships and a long-term connection, many have turned to short-term relationships (if you can even call them that). From situationships and sneakylinks, to the rise in friends with benefits/fuck buddy culture, the loneliness epidemic has been talked about for what seems like forever. 

Yet at the same time, people are complaining that hookup culture, and the dating scene of the pre-2010s  is dying. In fact, people argue that relationships are on the rise, as I was doing at the start. We currently exist in what feels like a post-apocalyptic relationship landscape. In one corner is situationships. In another is the ‘having a boyfriend is cringe’ mentality, and on the other side is the rise of conservative ideologies governing the dichotomy between men and women. Where women see men as wallets and men see women as objects and status symbols. Next door to that is cheating! I can drone on for hours describing the districts of the current playing field we have to deal with, and that's not even delving into the queer atmosphere. 

It’s obvious our world is falling apart, and it's no shocker that relationships are going with it. But I want to suggest something that's kinda crazy, and could be seen as contradictory. What if all these districts are rooted in the same goals?

Looking at the core of every relationship problem is still someone who is longing for a connection. Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum of love, you still want the foundational principles of love. What differentiates us is… just about everything else. Again, I could go on for hours discussing every problem we face regarding love in this day and age, but frankly, no one has the time nor attention span for that. So I’ll make this simple.

The current dating-scape is difficult, and for people scouring the lands for ‘the one’, things are looking downright impossible. And for this specific niche of individuals trying to cosplay as Hagrid, attempting to find ‘the chosen one’ whilst never having been in a relationship, there seems to be only one thing keeping them going.

Delusions.

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Are you sick of me?

Would you like to be?

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Let’s be so for real, could I really have begun speaking about lonely women without bringing up how we romanticise EVERYTHING? Particularly with the rise of Romantasy, and BookTok in general, the girlies long to be loved in the most gut-wrenching way possible. Like how can you expect someone who has been imagining a world filled with love, yearning, and obsession, to settle for meeting some rando on Tinder?

Now I know what you're saying. That's unrealistic, it's not something we should expect, that overall we should forget about it. But why? Why can't we have a love story that makes us swoon, where our significant other genuinely loves us and makes all our dreams and fantasies come true? 

I’ve seen it happen. I know people who are living a love worthy of the big screen. They're caught up in a reality the rest of us believe is a world away. 

Maybe in another life, I’d be writing this from the perspective of her. The girl who is living out my favorite trope, with a guy who is better than anyone I’ve ever read about. I’d tell you the joys of young love. I’d give you hope that you can find exactly what you’ve hoped for in this vast sea of ruin. 

Yet, I’m not. I’m just some girl who sits and imagines what it’d be like to be the girl he has a crush on. The one who he’d try to impress. We’d have this electric tension that makes the world stop. He’d have a massive crush on me and go running to friends after every miniscule interaction, telling them about her. They’d joke around and make fun of him, but that doesn't stop him. He thinks that she is everything he has ever wanted, and spends his nights restless. Tossing and turning, plagued with thoughts of that girl. 

One day, it'd be raining (obviously), and it’d be just the two of us. And we’d be angry at one another with every unspoken emotion on the tip of our tongues, ready to burst at any given moment. Our eyes interlocked, afraid if we looked away, for even a second we’d miss something. On the surface it seems like anger, but you don't need to dig deep to find the real emotions raging within. Those hidden feelings we put aside because we never wanted to ruin what we already had. Amid the heavy breathing, the tension would snap.

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Don't like anybody, tell me why it's different with you

Don't believe in love, but no one makes me feel like you do

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I wish I could tell you that I’m talking about a real person when I say all this, but I’m not. And honestly, I don't think there ever will be one. Because to get the guy, you need to be the girl, and I’m just not that type. 

It never bothered me before, and it doesn’t really bother me now. I know that when the time is right, everything will fall into place, and I’m not in a rush now. Love is another beautiful thing that humans have ruined, but maybe the authors and scriptwriters are writing an apology to society every time they make our hearts swell. 

They show love in an extravagant way, to distract people from the fact that love can exist in all kinds of forms, and so everyone will experience love differently. The only reason I still hold onto the hope that love exists is because of those around me.

So the next time you see a couple walking on campus, or hear someone's story time, don't put love on this pedestal above our current world. Because love isn't this powerful force that's meant to shake the earth. As humans, we put too much weight on this concept when in reality, it’s the one constant that has existed since the dawn of time. And it's something we’ll all experience without us even knowing.

Some may experience love in high school, or their first year of uni. Others would be at their first corporate job, or on a spontaneous getaway. How or why love comes your way doesn’t belittle its ever-lasting presence in our lives. 

You’ll never know when or where it’ll find you, but I can tell you this: if you’ve found love or you’ve yet to experience it, it will find you, whether you like it or not.

by Sora Al-Baghdadi