Love is Blind, Mamma Mia, and My Various Gender and Age-Related Crises
This season on Love is Blind, one Ilana will enter the pods, ready for love and willing to set all her priorities and personality aside. She’ll go on an incredible journey, and if she’s successful, will say ‘I do’ to the most mediocre man you have ever seen in your life. So, will we find out if love is truly blind?
I had, essentially, a full existential crisis the first time I tuned in to LIB. I was super late to the party, had already missed the boat on the first few seasons but was consistently intrigued by my friends’ Twitter (I will never call it X) threads chronicling reactions and memes. Catching up meant a constant barrage of texts to them, who probably were a little exasperated with me, as I inquired and commented on every aspect of a show they had watched two years prior. As I watched perfectly veneered individuals who took partners home to apartments that looked AI-generated (for the most part, shoutout to Danielle and her weird mascots though), my brain started to boggle and swim with the words “wife” and “husband.”
“So, what are you looking for in a wife?”
“A husband is supposed to…”
“A good wife–”
“I need a husband.”
I got stoned and I cried. And I thought about my grandparents, and my parents, and the men and women in my family I never got to know but that I have seen in faded pictures.
I had phases growing up where I would not, under any circumstances, wear pants. Skirts only. And then I hated skirts, because it meant looking girly, and GIRLY IS BAD! Boys good, girls bad. And I did theater and I did sports, and I was mostly bad at all of it but I would throw my little body into every minute, I would make sure I was seen. I am 8. And then I shoplifted some makeup, and smeared my face with Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse and came downstairs and my mom called me a harlot (“you can’t look like that in synagogue!!!”) I am 10. And then in fifth grade a boy in the hallway wags his tongue at me, holding up two fingers in a V, and another girl giggles and tells me has a crush on me. And I start dieting, I drink the lemon cayenne water all day until I throw up. I am 12. And then I want to be strong again, so I do sports once more. I acquire bruises on my knees that I’m told 'makes it look like I was sucking dick all night.’ I am 13. I have C-cups by 8th grade and “DSLs” but I am ugly and so to ask me out is a prank, I cry alone in my room most nights. I know nothing of boys, and thank God I know nothing of men. I exist as a girl but looking back, I don’t remember being taught how to be a woman.
For as much as I saw patriarchy affect my family and the world around me, I do not recall ever hearing the words “a wife should” uttered in my presence. No one ever instilled in me the need or importance of a husband, or the laundry list of tired traits a woman is supposedly required to keep around her. Strong, protector, provider. The minute someone uses these phrases earnestly around me I have to suppress laughter. As someone who has been genuinely lucky to have men in my family that aren’t…all…completely terrible, and who, yeah I guess, protected and provided, this is so ridiculous to me. I’m grateful I escaped even this tiny bit of patriarchal indoctrination, but it has made me woefully ill-equipped to handle Love is Blind.
Because on Love is Blind, sad people make terrible decisions purely in the service of these platitudes they were raised on, that you need to have a husband that does x, y, z. That all these years of independence you’ve had were just fast times, and now that you are 25, 29, GOD FORBID 34, it is very much time to pack all that shit up!!! Bradley from Seattle wants a wife who cooks and cleans, and so you will learn to cook and clean. Lauren from Austin needs a husband who will cut off all his friends to soothe her insecurities, and so you will text your friends and say “hey, this woman I met two weeks ago is more important than all of you now, because don’t you know I need a wife? And this person wants to be a wife. So this will be my wife and this is my life now, I guess.” Until the reunion, of course, when it is revealed that Bradley had secretly met up with Ashley after the pods!! The scandal of it all. It is, of course, because he thinks she is hotter than the woman who so desperately wanted to be chosen and who forced herself into a wife-shaped box for him because that, my friends, is what a good wife–nay, a good woman does. These weren’t the names of any of the actual people on the show, by the way. Or maybe they were, they do tend to blur together at some point, don’t they?
So I’m sitting there on my living room floor in the apartment I I have always lived in alone, wondering what the actual fuck is going on. I am ridiculously sad. I would like to add a disclaimer that I have previously had such low self-worth that I kept a straight face and remained googly-eyed when a man cheating on his girlfriend with me told me that he was raised by his wonderful grandfather to treat your woman like a queen!! I am on no high horse right now. Maybe a miniature pony, though, by virtue of the immense and expensive therapy I have done to not hate myself so much that I accept it as valid when a man tells me that he doesn’t want to give me too many compliments, as that would be too intimate, and it would go to my head. I have been able to prevent myself from murdering my rapist, although the occasional fantasy of him driving off a cliff does help me sleep sometimes. I have had the misfortune of loving men and the eerie premonition that I might again one day, but I have never spent time gazing up at empty shelves in my home with placeholders on it for the husband, the one I am apparently required to have lest my life be lonely and full of misery, as if I frequently frolicked with joy every time a man told me that I had to keep the secret of his lust for me, because Ilana, no one can know that I liked you.
So I change the channel (streaming platform, who the fuck has channels anymore) and I remember the story of a beautiful woman who raised her beautiful daughter on an island with no help from men. A woman who has maintained, across time and distance, close friendships with her uni friends who used to sing with her. A woman who started her own business in a foreign country. LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, DONNA AND THE DYNAMOS!!!!
I love Mamma Mia more than words can describe, but I’ll try anyway! If you were unaware, I am actually the world’s leading Mamma Mia expert. This is a self-appointed title of course but I can prove it!! In 2019, my coworker Edwin informed me over lunch that 12 Pittsburgh area high schools would be performing Mamma Mia as their school musical, as the rights for production had been released that year and everyone wanted a break from The Drowsy Chaperone and Seussical. And he suggested, as what I wrongly assumed was a joke, that we should go to every single one of them, and then do…something with that experience. I agreed, as a joke. Only to get home that night to an invite to a Google calendar of every single Pittsburgh area high school production of Mamma Mia. Long story short, we watched 12 high school productions of Mamma Mia. I have also seen both movies more times than I can count, often soothing heartache and period cramps with the sounds of Swedish disco covered by James Bond.
Why do I love this story so much!! I will tell you, because I have thought about this extensively. After spiraling, wondering if in fact, a love will ever accept that I have no intention of existing as a checklist of wifely duties, I am reminded of the stories of women, older than I am, living a full life free from the circus of men. I could be Donna, weary but full of love for what I’ve made, and with memories of adventure and recklessness. With the most powerful pussy in the world by the way!!! Let me remind you that three men (one gay!) traveled across the world at one word from a woman they slept with 20 years prior. I could be Tanya, four times divorced, rich and hot and flirting with the pool boy. I could be Rosie, funky and funny, a cook and writer. I could actually live life. And love is not off-limits. Love can come when you least expect it, someone can see you for all of that life you’ve collected, all the bruises and trophies it has given you, and want you then and there. So maybe one day, a man that cheated on his girlfriend with you will come back and apologize and tell you there hasn’t been a day he hasn’t thought of you (for any friends reading, I cannot stress enough how much that is a JOKE!!!!)
Mamma Mia teaches me that life does not, in fact, end if you are unmarried at 30, if you developed wrinkles or got Botox or ran a hotel or got divorced. Love is not out of reach for any of those reasons, and it might be possible to sit across from someone who isn’t gazing at you through the lens of “my grandfather taught me to treat my jilted bride like a queen, but only if she stays quiet and isn’t too loud and doesn’t cry because of what I do to her.” No one has given me their list of what their woman must be and I simply will never take one, to sit with and peruse and wonder how to be that person, purely to be able to say that I am someone’s.
I am mine, now and always. At 27, at 77. Love is not, in fact, blind. She can see me for who I am when I scream and cry and when I drink wine out of the bottle, sitting on my kitchen counter in the dappled, dying sunlight. She holds me when I wake up sweating and screaming. Because love has always been women to me. Why is it so funny that a good man is one known as a protector and provider? Because it is women who have answered my panicked phone calls in the middle of the night, wondering if everything will be okay. Women that packed up my haunted apartments, delivering me to the light. Women that provided protection, almost always from men. Women that love me and whom I love. Love is not blind, it is the women I see performing Super Trouper with me in spangly jumpsuits when we are either gray or holding regular salon color appointments.
An Ode to Glad He's Gone by Tove Lo
The other day I spent a few hours scrolling through my liked songs on Spotify. I strangely (relative to how much time I spend on the app) didn’t use that function frequently until recently. So the majority of the songs there, besides the requisite cringe album saves from high school years, track the various stages and eras of my mid-twenties in 4-7 song groupings. It was an accidental exercise in reflection for me, and I was fortunate enough to have the time and be in a peaceful enough environment that I could really sit and let my imagination take me away.
It’s February 2020, in NYC, weeks before disaster. My best friend is with me in New York, and we’ve hit the Barney’s closing sale and after several glasses of cheap prosecco, film a fake music video in a hotel room. In between laughter and additional sips, though, I’m trying my best but mostly fumbling my way through flirting with a new (and I promise this is my least favorite word in existence) situationship. I’d been really social the last few weeks. A New Year’s trip to New Orleans had been a life-affirming and confidence-boosting start to the year. I was on my shit, really. At the same time, I was doing that icky thing where you start feeling things for someone who is putting, like, zero effort into you. Embarrassing! In retrospect. And for me, is a general indicator of some insecurities that aren’t being addressed. So sitting on a Portuguese beach, I’m suddenly back to trying to get the right selfie angle in a hotel bed to send to a man who uses his beard to fake a jawline. My song saves from this period are ‘Be Honest’ by Jorja Smith, ‘Something to Talk About’ by Bonnie Raitt, ‘3 AM’ by Haim, and ‘Can’t Decide’ by Amine. And that situationship did what situationships must do, and combusted shortly after.
I scroll up a bit more, scanning through that little healing process where I banged my “bad bitch” playlist into the ground. I realize that my impromptu research is missing a crucial component: the EOY stats. My most-listened to song of that year was one that I had started loving prior to lockdown, but as soon as I start playing it I am transported. ‘Glad He’s Gone’ by Tove Lo has been my top 5 spotify songs in two different years, and I realize that it’s been a while since I heard it.
The song follows a girl talking her friend through a breakup, with the helpful but slightly exasperated tone of a friend that has wondered “this guy???” throughout her friend’s lovesick rollercoaster. She reminds her friend that she hid parts of herself to make this guy love her, that she was more fun single, that she’s in deeper than he is. And I couldn’t get enough. It wasn’t too dense, it was just fun and it sounded like my best friend hyping me up. I didn’t have many close friends nearby at the time, and every day blasting it in my car felt like a self-help session. Because, I wasn’t exactly doing well at this time (was I ever??) I worked like a maniac, I alienated people I loved, I let my heart get toyed with. And I miss it sometimes. The darkest, dumbest parts of my brain take me out of the perfectly good life I am living right now and they plop me down at random intersections where I’m rolling the windows down to catch a breeze driving home at 1 am with my non-slip server shoes next to me in the passenger seat.
I know I’m not the only one who does this, but I associate very specific parts of songs with extremely specific locations in which I heard it, and it meant something. And that can feel momentous, heart-wrenching, special when the song is tied to a really significant moment. The song playing out of the car while we raced alongside the country road we visited. In my headphones when you held my hand for the first time at the subway overpass. So why am I happy, in Europe, reminiscing about a time I know was bad for me through the lens of a cutesy little beat and the line dancing all night, get guys’ numbers? Why do I wanna be dashing though Target, sweaty from work, trying to grab a low-calorie ice cream (I said this was not a good time in my life) from the freezers minutes before closing?
On February 2nd, 2022, I saved a song that I had known for a while but wanted to make sure was downloaded into my collection. February 2022 was a reckoning, that if it hadn’t hurt so many people outside of myself I would consider it a valuable lesson, but instead it’s just regret. Because I became the most insecure, volatile, stupid version of myself I have ever been right around then. And I’m soundtracked by Rivers and Roads by the Head and the Heart. And I listen to it again. Been talkin' 'bout the way things change/And my family lives in a different state/If you don't know what to make of this/Then we will not relate. And I…I fall apart again. Because I miss everything, all the time. I miss versions of myself that I should’ve smacked the shit out. I miss versions of myself that I didn’t believe in. I miss versions of myself that didn’t count calories, I miss versions of myself that knew where home was.
I miss being a kid and not knowing what feeling shame for your music taste not being cool enough felt like. I miss thinking cat videos were the peak of comedy (actually, still might be) and the only thing the Internet felt good for. I miss my mom turning the lights off when I fell asleep if I forgot, I miss the streets I once had memorized. I miss Thursdays my senior year of college when my friend would pick me up and take me to class, I miss thinking that this one guy loved me. God, universe, whoever, can I go back? Please, just for a second, I need to turn the music off for a moment. I’m tired, I need to relax. Can I lay down and can my pillow be just supportive of my aching neck enough and can you let me roll the window of my blue Civic down as I rush home from the restaurant one more time? Can you let me bike down across Tempelhofer Feld for the first time again? Can I wake up on a snowy morning and drink my coffee on the couch by the window with both of my dogs on my lap? Can you let me know that I should say a proper goodbye?
Many things in my life the last few years have left without my permission. I am angry and I am bitter and I am sad that there is no complete version of home for me anymore. So much has died. People, animals, ideas, loves, plants. I would like to detach from all my connected memory moments, for just a second. I started this meltdown off just waxing on about a fun trip down Spotify lane I took, and now I can’t do anything but feel like a foolish mess as I ruin my own day.
Okay, I went to bed. I slept it off and took some time and now I have eaten a good breakfast and I have decided to absolutely blast Glad He’s Gone again, because God it’s just fun! I do my skincare routine with the version of the girl who believed a man’s lies, and I wash her clean. I ride my bike down my new street, and alongside me is the girl who realized she could move on. I can sip a whiskey sour with the girl who played Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright 45 times in one day, and call an Uber home for the one who cried when she saw Kehlani perform Piece of Mind. Living with this many girls is exhausting!!! They have very varied music tastes and it’s hard to find a thematic throughline through the day that way sometimes! Sometimes their emotions give me whiplash, and I’m the only one there to calm myself down and deal with myself.
And I’m tired. I get really tired. I’m tired of grieving. I get tired of not being happy and tired of my sadness not being profound enough to turn into great art. I’m tired of putting in work even though I’ve regretted every time I didn’t. I’m tired of begging for love, from so many including myself. But do you know who has been there for years hyping me up? Tove Lo. And so many of my closest friends, of course. So now, I’ve gotten home from the plane ride I took where I finished going through that Spotify list. And I tried so hard to relax, and to laugh at myself. Because goddamn, subtlety was not a thing there. So I have this little archive, a musical diary of sorts that I now know I can use to trigger a wide variety of unpleasant emotions. Very cool! I am going to treat that as both a weapon and a tool. Once in a while I will let myself slip into the saddest versions of me on purpose. I think that some of our skeletons are in our closets and some get reserved seats at our dinner tables. Well I have a skeleton that’s basically in my pocket at all times, and I need her to fuck off sometimes so I can get some rest.
Since I promised to do this every post and because I discussed music a lot today, here is my 8-track exposing my most recently liked songs on Spotify.
None of My Business - Tinashe
Shoot to kill, kill your darlings - underscores
Live! From the Kitchen Table - McKinley Dixon and Ghais Guevara
Asc. Scorpio - Oracle Sisters
I just Want It - Junglepussy
Big Eyes - Jill Barber
Pearls - Jessie Ware
Bless the Telephone - Labi Siffre
Reflections & Resolutions & Revelry
Hey there. Some thoughts on the end of the year and the start of a new one.
I am, right now, living out the closing hours of January 2nd, 2024. January 2nd is a strange day, no? January 1st carries so much weight: the first day to execute resolutions, but also the first day that many of us, myself included, spend hungover and rotting and contemplating what food to order at our doorsteps that will inevitably be slightly cold and a bit disappointing by the time it arrives. So January 2nd feels like the real first day of the year to me, but it carries that twinge of failure already because it feels like a true beginning moment has passed.
Blogs are played out, right? Everyone had a blog, then no one had a blog, now I can’t tell who has a blog. I never had a blog because I never thought I had much to say. But since I was young I have been described, often derogatorily, as talkative. I have so much to say. And though I stopped putting much weight in New Year’s Resolutions a few years ago, I told myself that this would be the year I stopped inhibiting myself in any way, and the year I would try new things no matter how much fear it put in my heart. Here I will put my thoughts, consequential or not, just because I can. Tonight I went to drink several martinis, which are not my usual drink order (I usually bounce around between gin and tonics, Moscow mules, and whiskey sours) because I wanted to take the above photograph of my brand new, meticulous martini nails. I already feel a twinge of shame: a mid-year resolution I made in the backyard of a Brooklyn dispensary was to not live for social media anymore. But it’s only the 2nd day of the new year, I still have time. Actually, I have and will have so much more time to do the things I say I will do.
2023 was, possibly, the most transformative year I’ve had to date. And I’ve had years where I moved continents! This year was, in a physical sense, relatively stagnant. Or so I tell myself when I try to diminish my growth and accomplishments, which is also something I should stop doing. So, in no particular order (certainly not chronologically) here is a summary of my past year.
I fell out of love. With another person, and with myself. The former makes me feel fantastic still, the second was a lot harder.
I got smaller, and I got bigger. I pinched and prodded myself into a shape that I thought would solve all my problems and then I found that it didn’t. So I stopped taking care of myself completely. And then I started again. And absolutely none of it seems to matter now.
In a city rife with cliches about the parties and the afterparties, I really did find myself on my adventures through Berlin’s nightlife. I pushed my boundaries and then set new ones. I cried on train rides home but received free french fries from sympathetic kebab shop workers. I took so many pictures of the sky on my street as the sun started rising. I woke up with so many knots in my upper back because it turns out that passing out drunk at 27 is not what it was at 19 (I am the first person to ever note this.)
I swam in the sunset waters in Greece and blew bubbles off balconies in Croatia. And there I was embraced not only by friends but their families as well, and I realized that despite being as loquacious as I am, I need to learn more words to be able to express my gratitude for that.
I celebrated a year of having the sweetest kitten in my house, who I got to see grow into the most beautiful cat. For every day that I could barely get out of bed to feed myself an unholy array of snacks, he was nourished.
I didn’t write as much as I wanted. I had a lot of ideas I did not execute. I wish I could say I have forgiven myself for that but I am still in the process.
I let go of needing another’s touch to be validated. I didn’t necessarily find the beauty in myself on my own, but baby steps are still steps. I stopped feeling desirable but I also stopped needing to feel desirable to feel worthy of my life. I found beauty in my anger towards those who hurt me, and held on to it as a glorious tool to guide me forward.
I didn’t do a lot of things that were good for me. That isn’t to say I did things that were bad for me (I mean, I did that too) but I just didn’t listen or trust myself enough, or just couldn’t find the energy, to do what I actually wanted to do.
I hosted parties and dinners. I cooked my grandparents’ recipes with all the love in my heart, and I told their stories when I served them. Holidays became such an important time for me to look around and realize that even if I am not always proud of myself, they probably are.
I lost so much. I said goodbye to two pets, one of whom had been my biggest comfort since I was 9 years old. My previous ideas of everlasting love and security were shattered. My sense of home, already shaky and precarious, crumbled entirely. Though this year marked a decade since I moved out of my parents’ house, it is only now that my childhood feels well and truly over. It was only in this wreckage that I committed myself to an idea I had had but never took seriously enough: my home is where I make it. And so I made a new one.
I sang a lot of songs off-key and thanks to my job at a karaoke bar, actually got paid for that. I got to revel in the wildness of that statement often, and feel so damn cool that my life actually looks like this.
I somehow cried less than ever before, which truly is saying something.
And lastly, I fell in love. With myself, through the eyes and in the arms of so many people who love me. To everyone whose couch I’ve crashed on, whose arms I have crumpled into, whose kitchens I have sipped tea and spilled the gossip, I am so deeply in love with you for everything you are and everything you have been to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
So here we are in 2024. I am moving apartments soon, which is sure to be as traumatic a process as always for me but this road has the brightest light ahead of it. I am as unsure about just as many things right now that I was on January 31st, I am more excited than ever. I wish I could say there are only good things coming, but I am unfortunately not that much of an optimist. More than ever, though, I find the things to look forward to. If I could pull all of this out of a year that so often left me feeling broken, I can’t imagine what a year going forward with the feelings I feel right now could bring. Abundance or bust, 2024. Let’s do this.
Bonus Content: 8-track
I started a ritual with my therapist where I give her a short playlist full of the songs that are emotionally affecting me at that moment a week prior to our session, and she listens to it so she can better understand me. This is not necessarily the one I am giving her (Hippocratic oath?) but it is a summary of me, right now.
Hold On - Alabama Shakes
CANDY - Rosalia
What a Shame! - girli
Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen
Nine Months - Annie DiRusso
Abstract (Psychopomp) - Hozier
Therapy - Kara Jackson
Still Alive - grouptherapy