LOVE ON THE BRAIN

Been thinking about ~LoVe~ a lot lately. Naturally, right? It’s February, Valentine’s Day just passed. The media I’ve been consuming and the fun projects I’ve been doing recently also have me reflecting on the topic extra: I watched the Pamela Anderson doc (haven’t stopped thinking or talking about it), I read this interesting interview with relationship expert Esther Perel on The Cut, and I’ve been working on a project with my partner and friends about different kinds of love - more on that here. ALSO! I started The Last Of Us, and just watched episode 3. I’ll never be the same. Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman have set the new standard for what true love is, period- I’ll be taking no further questions at this time. 

Back to Pamela. We did her soooo dirty in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s. Old white dinosaurs (think: Larry King grilling her about her breast implants) have been feeding us a false narrative about her for almost the entirety of her career, and now she’s finally speaking her truth. The blatant misogyny she has faced…it’s time we put some respect on her name. 

I mean it when I say I can’t stop thinking about her. I knew next to nothing about the details of her life before watching the doc, but now I’m obsessed. In the documentary, you learn about her full story up until now, detailing her journey with romantic love and heartbreak, eventually evolving into a revelation about self-love. Clips of her with her sons along with her live reactions to old journal entries/home videos are interwoven throughout the doc and reveal her depth and complexity.

What stood out most about Pamela is that she has not let her hardship jade her. She acknowledges the shit that she’s gone through, takes accountability along the way, but doesn’t completely vilify herself or anyone from her past. She is a hopeless romantic and is still figuring out what love means to her at age 55. A vulnerable queen. I love that she doesn’t claim to have it all figured it out and is open to editing her personal definition of love as she goes. Underneath it all, Pamela is every woman.

One more important note about Pam – I thought to myself while watching the doc, if she ain’t a Cancer…and looked her birthday up; yes, she is. She is arguably the Canceriest Cancer to ever do it.

Mommy? Sorry.

image via @evanrosskatz on Instagram

The other love-related thing that has been taking up a lot of real estate in my brain: Esther Perel’s perspective on modern society’s general dissatisfaction with love. She talks about “romantic consumerism,” and western culture’s heavy expectations around love in 2023. This quote from her interview read powerfully to me:

“And now we are really looking in the realm of relationships for what people used to look for in the realm of the divine: transcendence and mystery and wholeness and meaning.”

How thought-provoking. Perel’s take made me think about how media has imposed the idea that romantic love should give us everything we need to be self-actualized. The movies we’ve seen, the songs we listen to, even the TikTok / social media vernacular that we consume tells us what love should look like. The social media piece is especially interesting; I’ll see accounts like “We’re Not Really Strangers” post memes and pseudo-inspirational memes suggesting what healthy love v. toxic love is. The messaging is conflicting, and looks something like:

“You need to be whole in every way in order to be in a relationship.”

But also,

“You don’t need to be whole in order to be in a relationship, you just need to be with a partner that’s willing to do the work with you.”

I don’t want to scrutinize all the messaging, because I like and agree with some of it (like the latter example above). I like that there seems to be more public discussion about love than ever before, it’s interesting to analyze the messaging and its potential influence. If I were a teen consuming this kind of content on TikTok, I think I’d be really confused about what actually constitutes “healthy” love.  

I’m exposing my popcorn stream of consciousness here - but contemplating love’s (at times inconsistent) representation in media makes me think about how we should define love, which leads me to think of the book All About Love by Bell Hooks. Now more than ever, this book should be mandatory reading for every human being. In the first chapter, Hooks talks about how we need to “give ‘love’ words,” and get clear on how we define it personally.

While it would be amazing if we could all have a one shared definition of love, it’s obviously not feasible for all of us to be on the same exact page about such a nuanced topic. HOWEVER, we should get clear on our own individual definitions based on our experiences and clearly communicate our expectations with the people closest to us. 

Now that I’ve taken you on my wild love train of thought, I think we can arrive at a conclusion with these takeaways: it’s important to remain vulnerable when it comes to love (thank you for showing us the way, Pam), but also, we can’t expect everything we need in life to come from our romantic partners. Just as Esther Perel and Bell Hooks suggest, and as Pamela Anderson shows us in her documentary - I hope we all keep writing our own definitions of love, and edit as we grow. 

X 😊 X 😊

~Melli