To All the Giddy Lovers & All Those Yearning to Love

Lately, I’ve been wondering what my love story will be. How my love and I will orbit towards one another. What song will paint the era of love entering like a lightning strike or if love’s arrival will feel more like an ocean wave knocking me down unexpectedly — a sweet surprise that makes me laugh in surrender. I wonder when I will be rendered stupid and giddy, my red heart melted like candy in the summer, an ooey and gooey mess.

On the rooftop of my hostel in Rio de Janeiro this past December, I sat on a bar stool talking with my two friends and their new friend. It was the charming sort of connections that travel and hostel life bring, connections that seem to sit in their own dimension. Sort of like the friends you made playing at the park as a child. Lifelong friends for an hour or a day. I still remember the girl who gave me a piggyback ride home after I saw a snake in the park, and refused to touch my feet on the ground while visiting my father in Arizona the summer before second grade.

The park now is something like seeing Christ the Redeemer, or Christmas on Ipanema beach, or the impromptu communion of a stranger sharing their joint with you when you proclaimed that’s all you were craving.

Surrounded by views of a darkening teal ocean and a velvet blue sky, our conversation took on the form of something malleable like salted caramel as we let the conversation sculpt itself amongst teases and travel synopses. In this unfolding, McKenna, one of my Christ the Redeemer partners asked her usual, revealing and sweetly intimate question:

“How did your parents meet?”

Francesco (our other Christ the Redeemer partner) with long lashed doe eyes the color of chestnuts, remarked his parents’ love story was typical for their generation. They knew each their whole lives in their small town in northern Italy and they’d been together for better and for worse. Francesco then noted he planned to be an eternal bachelor more or less. We then looked toward our new friend from Germany as he explained how his French mother met his German father one day cutting his hair in a barbershop. An audible wow left my mouth as we bubbled with follow up questions.

Our conversation floated to the present in the night air warmed by the summer solstice that began some days before in the Southern hemisphere. McKenna and our new friend began to talk about the unexpected romance that flooded their lives quite recently. Our friend looked like the biggest fan in the world as he gushed over his girl, flashing us a picture of her kissing him on the cheek. Soon a toothy grin took over McKenna’s face as she talked about her lover. Her long brown hair parted in the middle, gently drifting against her tanned skin. She looked like a 70s beauty from somewhere in the Mediterranean, her eyelids squeezing close as she divulged that her guy already bought a plane ticket to see her again. They chimed together about how much they missed their person and let out a soft expletive realizing their giddiness, their love running over.

I beamed with them and was then asked about my current love life by one of the guys. I smirked at McKenna as earlier that day in the backseat of our taxi we happened to discuss events from my first summer of the year. “You deserve someone who would not want to lose you,” she spoke steadfastly after listening to my recount. After a few seconds of pondering what was worth revealing I exhaled, “My heart is very open and I’m just waiting for my lover to come my way.”

Maybe it sounds a bit crazy, but I feel like the romantic love I’ve been dreaming of is close. At 28, I’ve never been in love nor even had a Valentine besides my mom. Oh, and Harvey from the Philippines who sent me a candy-gram in the fifth grade. He used to share his pine nuts with me in the third grade and he’s the reason I write my sevens with a line through them because I noticed during math class one day and I thought it looked cool. Sometimes I wonder if the people who married the person sitting two rows behind them in their geometry class were in fact the smartest. It must be beautiful to grow up with someone when it’s meant to be.

And as beautiful as that may be, I can’t help but desire a love (story) that matches the magnitude of the adventure that has been my life. If Christian, purity culture entrenched teenage Shalenah had had her way, I would have been married (to a man) with two kids by 24 which is both scary and laughable. Yet, there was a time in my late teens and early 20s where I deeply lamented not yet having experienced a long-term romantic relationship. A time when it cut violently and relentlessly into my self worth and seeing giddy lovers was a sharpened reminder of my loneliness. A time I convinced myself no one would ever find me attractive which now all feels so ludicrous.

All of our paths are different and for some of us, the romantic relationships we’re worthy of may take a bit longer to bloom than others as we bloom into who we’re meant to be. In this moment, I feel as full and ripe as a fruit tree in August. There’s a deepening occurring and I feel rich in who I am, more bursting and capable than I’ve ever been before. In love with who I am more than I’ve ever been before.

All of this leads me to the epiphany I had the other day: we really don’t have to do anything but be in the place we’re supposed to be to meet the person or the people we’re meant to know. My current travels are teaching me to have faith in the Universe and in Spirit’s mystical dance. I realize I owe it to myself to believe in a love story of my dreams. Which in this season, does not involve a dating app.

Each time I hear a story of how two lovers met just from living life, I’m rejuvenated and reminded that I’m not dependent on an app to bring romantic love into my life. Sometimes it can feel as if the odds are against me as a femme sapphic woman trying to meet other queer women organically. I’m not a perpetual dating app user, but even when I dated men, I’ve almost always depended on apps to meet others romantically which has led to beautiful and not so beautiful romantic connections. Some which gave me wisdom through pain and others that have revealed to me the possibilities of what my heart is capable of experiencing. How just the scent of another can make me feel alive in every cell.

No matter the way, there’s a mystifying tension in the fragility of how two people meet. Destiny is such a strong sounding word but is quite delicate like lace. It can hinge on dramatic revelations yes, but also the tiniest, most imperceivable things. The almosts and the wasn’t supposed to’s. The spiderweb of things we cannot see. All the seconds and unsure decisions and last minute plans conspiring behind the scenes to bring two souls together.

Even my two weeks in Rio was a testament to fate.

So to my future lover, I hope you’re thinking about me too. That you’re focused and living within your wildest dreams and are at peace and feel loved. I hope someone told you, you’re beautiful today (and you felt it). It’s okay to be a hopeless romantic.

To all the giddy lovers, keep your hearts sweet. Gush without a drop of shame. Tell your love story again and again. I promise there’s no such thing as too much love in the air.