I never understood why the world ached so badly for romantic love. Swooning and gushing and cooing over your partner, drowning yourselves in sickly-sweet nothings seemed like a tacky endeavour. Allowing yourself to be known and needed by another was a risk I didn’t want to see the fruits from, no matter the fulfillment it seemed to boast. Love, at best, looked like a nagging parent or a rock in your shoe. At worst, it looked like avoidable suffering. All I could see was compromise I didn’t want to take part in, obligations that filled me with dread, and expectations I felt I could never live up to. I wanted nothing to do with it.

Coursing through my contempt for love was also an unexplainable sort of lingering. I felt fully that love held no place for me and that I contained no space for it, but how did I truly know that? What if my cerebral lack of desire for love was keeping me away from something I very well could have? That query burrowed deep within me, doubting my undying affair with being loveless.  I wasn’t quite sure I wanted, or was even worth love, but I felt I owed myself the experience of at least trying for it. I felt I owed myself proof of my inability for love. So, I went about trying. 

Dating men was not easy or enjoyable for me. Every stale date and conversation, every late night in a boy’s sterile apartment, felt like I was trapped in a fishbowl while the prospective men were children at a pet’s shop, tapping incessantly on the glass and googling at me. These experiences were isolating at best, and an attack on my humanity at worst. It drove me into the deepest pits of my ideologies that I wasn’t meant for love. 

In retrospect, my problem was holding onto the internalized notion that I had to date men, when in reality, I felt nothing more than apathy being in the arms of one. If love and romance meant a tacit understanding that I would have to choke down my indifference for it all, then it was understandable that I had wanted nothing to do with it. What was missing in between the blue bedsheets and half-finished dinner plates were the feelings, the sparks, the quiet moments, and the charged moments, the overwhelm and the intensity. Frankly, I was missing the juiciest, most anchoring parts of love. What is love without surrender to everything you think is correct? What is love without that passionate ache in your core? What is love without heart? 

It was here where I chose my queerness. Yes, chose. My queerness was never this “a-ha!” moment as a child where I saw the fleeting curvature of some random woman from the media and knew my physical attraction laid there all along. It was the total spiritual embodiment of love as a way of life. It was unleashing my pressing desire to be seen in full, loved in full, understood in full. It was stumbling into the truth that romantic love is messy and tearful and hard, but it’s also so grippingly beautiful and fulfilling and joyful.  

Choosing the inherent queerness that had always taken up shop in my bones and my psyche made pursuing love an intentional, active decision for me-it was a decision to show up for myself and respect what would fulfill me, rather than contorting to fit a frame I would never fill out. 

Choosing to embody what had always laid bare for me in the halls of my soul brought me to the realization that I was more than worthy of love-that I could want it, have it, even like it, regardless of the rotting thoughts from my past. Choosing a future where I understood that love was all encompassing, that it would paint a new path for me, that it would change me fundamentally and that it was always there for me, was my queer awakening. Or rather, deciding. 

I didn’t need to pine for love-I needed to choose it first.