What is Love?

I won’t ignore the grandiosity of that question. And I also won’t avoid using the word grandiosity to spare you a trip to Google or a dictionary. Treating you as less than you are is not love. Do people still even use dictionaries? Worse yet, do people even care what words mean? Regardless, this is a pretty major question that’s spanned the evolution of poems to pop songs and on-stage drama to drama being played out on reality shows. We ask but what does it mean?

I remember shows like Barney the Dinosaur or the Care Bears which preached about love in your heart. Desperately under-preparing us for a world where a man can drive a gun across state lines, kill two people, and face zero jail time. Is there love there that I’m missing?

I’m a big believer that we have to constantly, as human beings, redefine these abstract concepts. Do you know what grace really means? What does it mean to you? Charity? Peace? Joy? After all, how many supposed Christians throw around moral pronouncements for how we should behave and what women should do with their bodies. And yet they have the gall to throw a blind eye to the starving children in poverty, foster homes, cages, or on the streets. Is that love?

The toxically masculine I’ll give you a hug one year on Father’s day is that love? Is it enabling the shitty behavior that can turn insecure men into tyrants and 17-year-olds into murderers or murder victims? Is this hands-off let boys be boys while girls have a meltdown trying to solve a math problem because they’re raised to fear rape, and abuse, and attack rather than just being free to be human beings?

Maybe the question is not what is love but where is love? If you’re keeping track at home I went from Haddaway’s classic “What is Love (Baby Don’t Hurt Me)” to The Black Eyed Peas’ “Where is the Love?” I am not any closer to an answer.

There comes a time in your life where you have to reflect on these deep questions. I’m a toxic bachelor. I’m over 30 not-quite-painfully single but also not even really trying to share my life with someone. I’m still trying to find a life worth sharing. Doing the healing, the emotional work, the figurative work, and the work work to get that Instragam-worthy life. Hell, I’d settle for the life that straight white men are so often bored with. A partner who loves me, a home, a job that I can do with minimum effort.

I look at men like they’re food. Like some sort of gender dysphoric succubus feeding on sexual energy to stay alive. Treating men in the same toxically masculine distorted way as my gay forefathers passed down to me with their leering glances, unwanted grabs, shitty attitudes, and entitled approaches.

I learned to be better. I ask consent, I check in with people, I try to be the best man I can be. I try to be the best person I can be. But I also shouldn’t have to hand someone a scroll or do a Ted Talk to air out all of my dirty laundry. My traumas should not qualify me for empathy.

But I’m a man of multiple cultures, multiple perspectives, multiple voices. People love the novelty but rarely stick around for the reality. I’m a fun show to watch but everyone’s secretly glad it’s only once a week. They couldn’t handle bringing the whole thing. It’d be like The Ring. They’d die in 7 days.

Being gay is a funny ironic twist. A boy raised only by women left spending his entire adulthood spending time exclusively with men. Blessed to have dodged the toxic masculinity bullet by having my shitty emotionally unavailable father left in the dust. I dumped him. It’s sobering at 19 to be the more mature of your two parents and realize, “Dad, it’s time I see other parents.”

From 19 to now I’ve cobbled together some ideas of manhood that my therapist confirms is a good man. And if I’m being honest while I may have wavering self-esteem and toxic self-destructive behaviors I can cop to the truth. I am a good man. But then the question arises…if I am good, where is the love?

I don’t say this in some melodramatic “woe is me” kind of way. I’m a discerning man and I don’t suffer fools. I also have integrity and cop to my mistakes. While I may have the toxic masculinity that makes emotions confusing and esoteric, and constantly feel the need to defend my paper-thin ego, I am not the type to think that I am the center of the universe and take no accountability for my shit.

I like to remind my female friends our interactions are purely voluntary. Men are my sex partners, friend pool, and my preferred romantic partners. I treat all women equally like neutral shapeless automatons capable of independent thought and not burdening me with their drama.

So often we queers become a novelty. The magic gay. Some source of amusement magically gifted with fashion advice and some super-secret insight into the male psyche beyond…What did he just tell you? So is love being the weird gay pet?

Is love being someone’s high? The Nintendo they play with turn and turn off and leave when they’re done with you. Am I meant to waste valuable time and energy helping some girl live out her gender-neutral Beaches fantasy that we are ride or die until they meet a boyfriend or have a kid and disappear? Meanwhile, are women really combating homophobia if we can’t admit that the misogyny at the core of homophobia is what is keeping us all oppressed?

What is love? It should be a simple question. I went to Catholic school. I feel like this was an exercise I did in some class instead of learning geography, economics, or world history.

I have lived a pretty decent life. It’s not that I am incapable of love. I had a mother who loved me and took care of me. She made sure I was never at a want for anything. She treasured me. But somewhere in the abuse she’d suffered by my father, working two jobs to survive, and still trying to tend to the wounds left at her doorstep by society, racism, misogyny, and the people who raped and murdered our ancestors. Was there space for someone else?

I know I was loved. The mere sight of me sent my grandmothers into fits of joy. I was the only male child in a Latino family. There’s some cache. But you become like some feudal emperor. Let’s dust him off, bring him out, parade him around, a few waves, and back to your room. My father =was always a bit too eager to hug me and love on me but was also fucking abusive. There was this passionate love for my physical presence but a complete disregard for my emotional well-being.

I don’t hold anyone responsible. Is that love? Is forgiveness love? Was Jesus right? Is Jesus going to come back and punch Mitch McConnell or someone in Washington who resembles him and kick him in that weird bulbous neck goiter he calls a head? Is my hatred of a certain politician whose name rhymes with Snitch DickCondell love? Love for humanity? Agape?

I find myself an adult. Going from broken mess to broken mess, I should say man not mess. But everyone in West Hollywood seems to want some of my crazy glue but only if they can take it while wearing a mask or turning me from sex stud to just a throbbing flesh dildo.

I just feel like maybe the issue isn’t everyone has a mental illness. Maybe society is just fucking broken. Maybe it can no longer withstand people watching starvation, suffering, and death all around them. Maybe it’s having to focus on the bottom line and not exploring what’s at the bottom of your heart. I find solace in knowing the one thing I did get in lieu of lovey-dovey words of affirmation, pats on the back, and ego-stroking was survival skills.

So whether we end up fighting over spam and ramen in a post-apocalyptic landscape or the aliens come and eat the 8 billionaires and free us from wage slavery I know I will survive. But I can’t help but wonder. And I couldn’t help but ask myself in a trite, Sarah Jessica Parker voiced Sex and the City monologue moment….what is love? And are we all just too blond to see that maybe, just maybe, it all is.