I am fairly certain that November is the season of love. It cannot be autumn or winter for the former is the season of lust and the latter of resigned contentment. And if you must know, spring is the season of flirtation and summer the season of something like love but without all the complications - call it "like." November is the month we could all afford to skip. Unless you were born in November - my roommate would kill me for doing away with her birthday month - or you consider Thanksgiving to be the kind of Christmas where food is the gift, you really don't care about November. It's cold, you have no way of pulling up your suffering grades, and everyone seems to be paired off in kind-of-romances they began in September.
Everyone wants to be in love. Forget sweet nothings and dates and the progression of physical entanglements. Everyone falls in love so they can fill a void. We're born lonely and I think 11 months out of the year we're pretty good at resisting this loneliness through conscious acts of loving - whether we're loving our parents, our friends or even our kind-of-romance partners. But there's something about November. The year is almost complete and the cheer of holidays and the promise of a fresh start still seem forever away. We're tired and cold and as we finish our third cup of coffee while staring at a blank page, we're alone.
OK, so I have a boyfriend, a sister with whom I share DNA, and six pets only two hours away who do that great "loving unconditionally" thing. I can write at a comfortable distance, then, about love and loneliness. I can tell you how the seasons play out; how the flirtation of spring leads to a summer romance where "love" is thrown around just because it can be. And how this "love" turns to lust when fall comes around because lust is the last resort for people desperate to love those they "love." And how in November you're alone. And in winter you've resigned yourself to whatever remnants you were left with in the fall. At least you have spring to look forward to.
We're in this cycle because we want love so badly. We want it most in November. We drink one more drink just so we have the courage to go home with a warm body we don't really care about. We cling harder to what we have just so it doesn't go away. I may not be "alone" now, but every other Connelly - please see years 0-19 - has had lonely Novembers. This is for her.
The best kind of love is the love you don't give away. I'm not euphemistically talking about maidenhood here, but actual love; love you direct toward yourself. You know how difficult it is to survive the cycle described above. Well multiply that exhaustion and frustration and sadness by 10 and you'll know what it feels like to love yourself.
Romantic love is great for movies and marriage, but it really doesn't fit in with 20-somethings. How fully formed are we as humans when we're still taking tests and writing papers, waiting to be graded on our performances? Aren't we in this four-year process of creating ourselves as we create and mold the information within and around us? How do we possibly have room for two people in our personal bubbles of self? And yet most co-eds don't even hesitate to allow someone else, either for a night or a year, into their bubbles of self-creation. We're given four years to be entirely selfish, yet we constantly choose to share ourselves.
There's nothing wrong with dating, falling in love, lying next to a warm body. I've done all three. But sometimes I wonder if I've done anything else. Have I ever tried to pull myself out of the cycle of seeking and wanting and just directed a little need-based affection toward myself? Loving yourself, I think, means to look at the parts of yourself you really, really want to go away. You pull these parts out for your significant other and they wrap their arms around you and for a moment they go away. But can you hug and kiss these parts away for yourself? Can you face yourself without someone holding your hand?
I see so many people, girls mostly, who give and give and never get anything in return. They love too hard and too quickly and when kind-of-romances fail to love them back, they're left without any love left to mend themselves. When did we decide that it was OK to love everyone else more than we love ourselves? Our crushes, our lovers, our class partners get more attention than we do.
Children in other countries get more love than we give ourselves. Love means time and reflection and harsh realities. Loving yourself means facing these things alone.
So it's November. You're out and you look for someone nice to take you home. You're in the library and you strike up a conversation with a stranger because you're sick of being inside your own head. You're cold, you're tired and you're very much alone. And yet, November is the season of love. The person who's going to make all of your dreams come true is staring at you in the mirror. Go home and curl up with yourself.
Connelly's column runs biweekly Tuesday. She can be reached at c.hardaway@cavalierdaily.com.
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