I’m in Love: Is It Making Me Basic?
I’m embarrassed by everything. I’ve always considered this a positive quality—like I have this special ability to see things as they truly are, while others are left blindly enjoying themselves, oblivious to how ridiculous they look. For instance, at a friend’s wedding last summer, while everyone was busy embarrassing themselves on the dance floor, I opted to be cool and drink alone in the corner. Halfway through the night, a random uncle came up and asked me why I wasn’t up grinding with everyone else. “Because dancing is embarrassing,” I replied flatly, as if this were obvious. The man looked at me, bemused, and said: “How could something that’s an expression of pure joy ever be embarrassing?” Suddenly I felt like maybe I was the ridiculous one.
My skill for embarrassment has long protected me from anything that requires any degree of vulnerability—karaoke, exercising in public, celebrating my birthday, et cetera. But then recently I fell in love and discovered that literally nothing on earth is more embarrassing. When you’re young and naive, you assume falling in love will be fun. Wrong. In reality, new love is a state of perpetual embarrassment in which you are forced to repeatedly face the many ways in which you are in fact cheesy, basic, and emotionally inadequate. It turns out love really is a battlefield, and the first casualty is your entire personality.
For years, I’ve scoffed at couples for doing lovey-dovey stuff—holding hands in public, eye fucking in restaurants, posting photos with captions like “Can’t believe I found you!” It all seemed mawkish and performative, as if they were imitating a version of love they’d seen in a Katherine Heigl movie. I’d think, I’m transgressive—I have threesomes with people I meet at the bodega at 3:00 a.m. and you’re all just a bunch of squares with your feelings! But now that I’m in a relationship, I find myself doing these basic bitch things, which is really annoying, honestly, because I’m like, Um, I thought I was edgy?
Turns out, I’m not. Scrolling back through my text history with my boyfriend, I realized that literally 90 percent of the texts are just “I love you!” or “I miss you!” or the come emoji over and over on repeat, like I’m one of those AI girlfriends programmed to text lonely people in Japan. Poems suddenly make some sense to me. I find myself talking in a baby voice unironically. We’ve devolved from trying to impress each other with pseudo-intellectual conversations about gun control to mainly conversing in a weird gobbledygook language of half-cooked inside jokes that make no sense to anyone, even me. Essentially, I’ve become one of those people I hate, and I can’t stop it, but I sort of love it even though it’s disgusting, like the relationship equivalent of Miranda eating cake out of the garbage on Sex and the City.
My friend Sara, a 30-year-old talent agent, has a similarly antagonistic relationship with her mushy impulses. “At the beginning of every new relationship, I’m always like, ‘I’m a cool girl—I don’t need all that cheesy shit,’” Sara told me, sipping her skinny margarita. “But then if my boyfriend doesn’t do that stuff for me, I’m like, I will murder you. Honestly, not getting flowers on Valentine’s Day feels like a full-on emotional assault.”
Sara was on a roll. “When I’m single and I see people hiking Runyon Canyon holding hands, I’m like, ‘You are so fucking sweaty—please stop touching each other. I feel clammy just looking at you.’ But when you fall in love, you’re suddenly like, ‘Ugh, I do want you to hold my sweaty hand. And I do want you to take me ice-skating in Central Park at Christmas, even though that’s the corniest thing you could literally ever do—but, like, fuck you, take me ice-skating for one stupid hour without making me feel weird about it, and I’ll suck your dick every day for 365 days.’” She sighed defeatedly. “I think when I’m single, I have to tell myself I don’t want all that cheesy stuff, in order to not kill myself every Sunday. It’s depressing to say, but it’s true.”
We all have our strategies for coping with vulnerability. Personally, I tell myself I’m doing sappy stuff “ironically”—as if it’s an inside joke with myself. Like recently, I set my phone screen to a picture of my boyfriend and me kissing, thinking, LOL! It’s funny because it’s something I would never do! Me and myself thought this was hilarious, until last week at brunch, when a friend called me out on it. “Is your boyfriend your phone background?” she asked, horrified. “Yes, but it’s meta. Like, a self-aware commentary on romantic clichés,” I protested. “Wow,” she replied. “That’s boring.”
Pet names are another endless source of shame. When we first started dating, if my boyfriend called me sweetie, I’d get this pang of embarrassment so sharp that it felt as if my stomach was trying to escape through my throat. I tried to turn it into “a joke” by replying to his pet names with a goofy gagging sound. (It was never funny enough that either of us actually laughed, but it I kept making it nonetheless.) After weeks of this, he eventually said, “Sweetie, can you stop pretending to throw up after I say nice things to you? It actually hurts my feelings.”
It’s the same with sex. To this day, any sincere expression of emotion during sex makes me squirm. For some reason, it’s always been easier for me to fuck than to make love. I would happily let drunk strangers hog-tie me, but looking my partners in the eye during sex and telling them “I love you” . . . now that is truly perverse.
I needed to commiserate with someone about my love-induced basicness, so I called my friend Ryan, a 31-year-old TV writer. Ryan has a dry, scathing sense of humor, but when he talks about his boyfriend, I barely recognize him—it’s like his dark heart has been replaced with a marshmallow cloud. “Love gives you brain damage,” Ryan said matter-of-factly. “The experience of falling in love is so cliché that you suddenly find yourself truly relating to a Mariah Carey song that was written in a Swedish pop factory. And you’re like, ‘Wait, what? But I’m an individual! I’m a lo-fi, fuzzy Beach House song; I’m not a Mariah song!’ But maybe we’re all Mariah songs just waiting to be played?”
Unlike me, Ryan’s philosophy is to lean in to his own embarrassment. “I think you just have to own it,” he said. “Life is always going to be complicated, so if you can find solace in the universality of love and its basicness, I think that’s actually a lovely place to be. The essence of basicness is letting yourself be, without judgment. And I think an aversion to basicness implies defensiveness—an inability to let yourself go. Love weakens your defenses and lets you surrender. Because deep down we all have a deep well of basicness inside us.”
Ugh, fine. I’m not a special snowflake. I am a weak, sappy loser, just like the rest of you. I don’t want to be too embarrassed to love someone—that’s tragic. If you’re above everything, then you have nothing. So I’m giving this sincerity thing a shot. But I still won’t dance. That’s disgusting.
