what is it like to be in love with me?

what is it like to be "fourth person" with me

I want to love you in the fourth person. I want to love you because I want to know myself. Man is that selfish?

I can only say I want to love you, instead of “I love you,” because I believe I can only fully love someone if they let me. If you don’t let me, that is a great tragedy to me but mostly just me. I don’t know if it is to you, but a long time ago, I promised myself I’d let myself feel everything because believing the feelings are even of consequence is the thing I felt robbed of as a kid. I want to love, and love in fourth person:

• The First person: “I”

• The Second person: "you"

• The Third person of “me through your eyes - “she”

What of then, The Fourth, “you, through my eyes”…

The reason I want to love you in the fourth person is it’s the only way to animate the third person. It animates the “me” that only exists to you. It makes that “me” matter deeply, makes her penetrate your existence, makes her hunger for you, and it makes you suddenly real to me, in wild Technicolor.

What does that you to the she do? What does he think, what does he want, what does he do with that golden robe? The one with my love?

What does that he, through my eyes, think of me, through his own eyes?

I believe in every perspective — the light that refracts from me, then to you, then to you seeing me, then to me seeing you… every perspective is reflecting things back to me.

I could be seen through your eyes in the third person, with the camera marking it all… But how could I experience you experiencing me? How could I know what it’s like?

Then I wonder of your idea of yourself — in my eyes — who’s accounting for this?

How have I failed to notice what you wanted this whole time was to preserve my idea of you, an idea you yourself had conjured up?

Couldn’t we both learn to look at each other through that perspective? Of how the other sees the other?

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I’m experimenting with this lately. Try arousing yourself by asking yourself: who am I in the eyes of everyone else around me?

This is hard. So many Taylor Swift songs and Sabrina Carpenter songs revolve around this idea of getting off to who you are in other people’s eyes.
Lady Gaga’s recent song, “How Bad Do U Want Me”:

'Cause you like my hair and my ripped-up jeans
You like the bad girl I got in me
She's on your mind, like, all the time
But I got a tattoo for us last week
Even good boys bleed
How bad, bad do you want me?
'Cause you hate the crash, but you love the rush
And I'll make your heart weak every time

While my whole life, I’ve watched myself only through my own eyes, or my mother’s eyes. She saw someone she was anxious wouldn’t make it, and so from that, I’ve only understood the flaws I see in myself, the strengths I’ll try to bolster til the bitter end, the idea of myself isn’t intoxicating. It just is. I’m alive because I chose to survive by being as full of joie de vivre as possible. But if I’m the one having all the feelings — that indicates I’m no longer the one merely observing.

So what, what would I do if I was writing verses about me in that experiential format:

Cause you like reading my blog, you like listening to me talk and you find my thoughts soooo fascinating, you think I’m soooo short and cute because I’m only 5”2, you love to see me be cute and peppy, you love how I’m serious about the meaning of life, you embrace how I engage in banter with youuuuu —

I can’t even imagine how this would genuinely go. Weirdly it feels so generic. I am frustrated the feeling spilling out of my fingertips can’t be mastered by anyone — to my knowledge — automatically.

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I’m so hungry for self-knowledge, that I just now am realizing the real reason I want to be mutually in love: I don’t know how to process who I am, not fully, unless it’s through someone’s eyes, unless I turn myself off for long enough to look. I’m missing the feeling in my extremities as a result. I’m missing fundamental, crucial, data for what’s going on outside of me, for a person to model and feedback loop back for me who I am.

I realized that when I watch people, I don’t do it very deeply. I see them deeply, sure, but as if I am in absolution a neutral divine party, loving them very neutrally and not in a meaningful way that could ache. I never thought to focus how they thought of me, in the big picture. I don’t think of myself as a player in that story as well. To be unable to observe yourself through the eyes of another is to miss those parts of the divine.

With people, I only thought of reacting to what I feared they thought of me — nitpicking the ways I talk too much, rolling their eyes at how OCD I can be, how overly blunt my speech is when I’m stressed, how excited I am about intellectual topics and can’t have a ‘light’ convo… and then I started to realize this was a projective protective layer. I couldn’t see what else they saw, missing the forest for the trees.

While focusing on discounting the ways in which I was worthy of being wanted by someone else, I stumbled upon the feeling that I don’t like looking. I don’t like seeing from any perspective but my own. Because that was the last thing I got to keep when I lost my innocence as I got older and older. It was the idea that I could still see it my way even if no one else did.

But now, now I am writing because I wish to convince the Other out there that I am worth loving. I need to convince you I’m worth loving because I feel like without consent, I can’t venture to know how you could possibly see me. And that knowledge feels so lost.

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What was always crazy to me about the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice was, Orpheus loved Eurydice, and the urge to look at her transcended all rational desire to keep walking forward, to have faith without any validation. The primal urge to let all logic fly out the door in the face of passion, is what makes that story captivating.

It’s all about looking, you know. I realized looking is all about the mirrors. The mirrors of your beauty reflect my own. But only you can come up with the words and the names for those. I can’t.

I wondered if maybe I should learn to look. And then I realized the pain, the pain that lives inside, it says something like,

“Because I’ve never said I love you to someone and heard it said back, I never got permission to see myself through their eyes.” It’s almost as if there’s this one pesky window that can’t be opened, the one window I wish would open and let the light in so I can finally see something I simply cannot without an aid.

I suck at looking at people’s faces. It’s like I don’t want to see. It’s like I don’t want to feel all of existence bubbling inside of me when I gaze out. It’s like I don’t want to contemplate if I’m worthy of eyes of God on me, watching me to make sure I can honor the gifts being given to me. But I don’t even know if I don’t want to, or if I just can’t.

I’ve realized it’s really hard for me to love someone who loves me but who I don’t love back. Love back like that. That “I don’t love” part is so difficult. I won’t even seek to see myself through your eyes unless I already am in love with the you I see in my own eyes. Without being in love with that you, I would not even trust that I could see myself clearly in your eyes. Because the point of Love is to know ourselves. It’s to hunger for and yearn for yourself more perfectly than you ever could before. It’s to stare into your face and gape because you’d do anything to keep being around that presence forever.

So really the only times I fell in love were when he was blasting energy at me, an energy I can’t ignore, whether it’s on the subway platform or in the dimly lit restaurant or sitting on that park bench or on a piggyback through Chinatown or cleaning up my house after a potluck or grinning on that FaceTime call, that he was seeing something that deeply delighted the recesses of his soul, and I couldn’t stop giggling and blushing the entire time because I felt so tickled. I would feel the appearance of some golden-eyed angel look toward me, from the side, and feel vastly humbled by what he saw, because for the first time, I could sync up with someone and see clearly a world through their eyes I rarely could be shown with words alone, beyond what I’d deemed reachable or reasonable. Suddenly, I could see utter heavenly joy and hope wash over someone’s face, simply because we were speaking. I’d suddenly stop feeling like the Subject of everything, but also the Object. Something that was so desired, it could now be flattened. I wanted to be senseless. I wanted to experience myself as so insignificant and distant, away from how I usually feel totally unable to detach from my own perspective. I wanted float above it all. I wanted to make someone flustered and hunger, but not need to eat to satiate. I wanted someone to starve themselves for a look at what it meant to feel both wisdom and foolishness in one glance. It’s such an innocent way of looking… yet so all-knowing.

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It’s sad that this is all I can ever write of my fantasies of how I’d want to love you. The perspective would be:

I’d read something beautiful, whether online, in a book, or see something catch my eye with my camera, collect it, and bring it to you at the end of the day. No matter what had gone on that day, I’d be hastily twirling my thumbs on the subway, so excited that I get to go home to you to share and talk about everything. And I’d live for these moments: When you’re weary and tired and don’t have life left in your eyes, because you’re always working so hard and quietly and humbly, you would still do the small things. You would still pause for even a second, to look at what beautiful thing it was I brought. And you’d want to celebrate it, even briefly, by talking about it, and how to do good by this passage, and how to be better than those in your life who failed at honoring it and how to be like those who’ve taught you how to emulate it. Even while you loosen your tie after a long day, even while you’re about to go walk the dog, even while you’re waiting at the table for me to finish my turn at cooking for the week, you blow out a breath and a soft smile that celebrates that we’re here. You’d lean over with the book in one hand and squinting at it, furrowing your brow with thought, because you take that sort of gentle and applied philosophical discussion so seriously. You know it underlays everything you do, and me too.

I’d want to love you by throwing my hands up in frustration that you didn’t add things to the calendar like I asked, again, because I needed my perfect little neat universe interrupted with your slight clumsiness, lost in your own head and bookishness again. I’d fume for a few minutes but then let my lips drop into a slight smirk of familiarity. Yea, that’s just how you are. Because every time you fumbled and came to brunch late or had to book a plane ticket last minute, refused to confront an aggressive coworker, or spilled your coffee because you’d stammered a little too hard, I’d roll my eyes and get a little annoyed like I always knew I would, but then let you cheer me up by offering me a passage of your own that you knew I’d like, a cute little cue for us to share our rituals together, building a neat and well-trodden life together where I take care of one thing and you take care of another. I’d want to be the tempestuous fiery mouthy one, you the patient and kind watery one, reminding me to return to the feelings even when I would orient toward pragmatism.

What function would you fill in my life? Well, that’s just it. I want to be inconvenienced by someone like you, feel myself withdraw a little bit out of frustration just to unfurl and melt again when you throw me one of your shy smiles and make me feel innocence curl in my toes again. I’d want someone to make me more serious but softer. You’d make me remember to let things go and take them more lightly, more like you, because even dysfunction felt holy when it came out of you. I’d want the thoughts between us to dance and intermingle, exploring new ones I’d never thought possible, even letting ones I’d never had before and didn’t want to have change me. I’d smile softly when we’d walk slowly together, keep up with you slowly look at you with shining eyes, but also be taken away because you’d see me too.

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But how would I want to be experienced?

You’d get a little exasperated constantly by how I’m so hyper-attentive to everything, find it par for the course and a little arrogant of me to always want to position myself as the “helpful one”, always take things too personally when I feel disrespected by people who just don’t understand and it’s a mistake, not a conflict. You’d wish I’d learn how to leverage the good faith argument by default when I felt insecure, want me to stop hiding my emotional position on something vulnerable, not need to debrief a movie so intensely and make it about some higher idea when sometimes you want your brain to take a rest, wish I’d be less triggered if I wasn’t sure if you were judging me, be a little exhausted constantly by how I can talk a mile a minute and you’re barely able to keep up the pace when you haven’t been able to context switch and your feelings are hurt because mine got hurt from that. You’d be unimpressed by my intimidation and apprehension around whether the world owes me something, or whether I have something to prove via my darkness.

But through it all, we’d always crawl into bed together and cuddle there, feeling the horrors of the mundane and also the remarkable settle into our bones, but comforted by the fact that the other was always there to help us figure it out, help us believe that life isn’t just about refusing to believe in fairy tales, that it’s about finishing neatly the narrative arcs you see yourself set on, and about surrendering yourself to a higher power. We’d lace hands and nuzzle and grin. We’d feel less daunted by the tasks of saving the world we both wanted to do, simply because the other reminded us not only why it was worth doing, but how they could help us do it.

I’d also touch your face and feel myself in awe of the divine when you smiled at me. And suddenly, I’d see all of my flaws illuminated as holy and pleasing because they made me the kind of person that wasn’t perfect, but fit with what you wanted to drink out of life anyway.

…

But what’s missing, you see, is I can idealize why those flaws of mine would be bearable. But I feel cut off from wondering what of the parts of me that you’d find so pleasing, they’d outweigh the cost of those flaws. I can substitute in that the flaws matter less than my beauty. But what about my beauty? Isn’t it self indulgent to try to imagine how you might find me beautiful? Is it also selfish and desperate to want to know?

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Today, I reread that passage about honey on the knife .

All we can say is that we want to know, because being in and of the world is a sticky question. Sometimes the stickiness of the world is very sweet; it is like honey on the razor’s edge. You lick the blade and “Oh! how very sweet it is!” Then there is the sharpness, and the blood.

Some people would say, “Honey is a wicked and treacherous thing. It is best avoided if you want to avoid being cut.” This way of thinking sees the razor’s edge of life as undesirable. Some people would say, “Why not find a way of tasting the honey without getting cut?” This is another way of thinking that also sees the razor’s edge of life as undesirable. Some people would say, “The razor’s edge is all there is—nothing but pain; therefore extinction is release.” This way of thinking denies the sweetness of the honey. Some people would say, “The honey is all that really matters; if you’re cut by the razor’s edge then at least you will have tasted the sweetness!” This way of thinking accepts both the honey and the razor’s edge but divides the experience. But the honey and the razor’s edge are a single experience. If you manifest a human form, you taste the honey on the razor’s edge. If you live for the honey and see the razor’s edge as an occupational hazard, either your experience of the honey becomes too sickly sweet and makes you vomit or you lacerate yourself on the blade.

What is it to taste the honey on the razor’s edge? Is it to reject the experience of either or both in favor of seeking an answer in nonexistence? Or is it to accept the unified experience as being what is, and thus to be liberated from duality?

I find that when people simply flatter me, but show no ability to shy away from me in flinches of apprehension, that they are not seeing the razor’s edge of my honey. But the problem is, I have still divided my experience of my own self love. I have separated the razor from the honey, and begun to get off to the experience of being a razor. When I think about honey, I think of all the other sugars in the world. I feel less lustrous, less remarkable. I thought maybe I could get by by making my razor edge more dark and twisty, not have it be “appealing,” but have it be special.

But now I fall to my knees, and I weep at how, how unappealing. Why would someone only want to fall in love with me if it felt “dangerous”, as opposed to comforting and soft and sweet even with the sharp component.

I can only purport to imagine the way you’d actually see me, in your loveliness, through your lovely eyes that see narrative in everything and understand the urge to bring the common lived experience to birth on earth:

You’d be excited that I always have a new idea to add, a new way to expand your thinking, a new angle to consider. You’d love that I cry so easily at everything, yet also tie my hair back and handle it all. You’d love how unpredictable I am in my thoughts, yet predictable in my commitment to always do the right thing. You’d love that I’m reliable, but that all my executive function is hard won and the product of years of self prioritization. You’d be in awe that my big heart for my community is also held with the wisdom and commitment to bettering my own sense of integrity first and foremost. You’d like the way the light touches my face when I’m in thought, and the way I smile disarmingly to break up the seriousness of my expressions, and the way it never falls off my face when I look at you. You’d love the way I frown disappointingly but honestly when I ask you a serious rhetorical question about your choices. You’d love that I’m a tough judge but fair evaluator in every situation. You’d love how I can generate a fun conversation to have at any time, so I’m an eternal slot machine of interesting ideas and witty banter. You’d want me to interlocute on everything you’re doing, because your mind is also so active that you need someone to help calm it down.

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I feel a need to absolve myself of the crime of obliviousness, of not understanding how I function as a romantic object in this landscape. I feel deprived. I’m desperately pleading for the knowledge of knowing how I am being received, which is so different than being perceived. I want badly to know that my essence can be drank of, that my consciousness can be thought of, that my countenance can be marveled unto. I am tired of not knowing. How are knowing and believing tied? I want to find out, for I have survived for so long on so little.

I don’t need a romantic partner to give me the respite I seek, right? I don’t need him to experience the relief from no longer shouldering the fear that a fourth person perspective doesn’t exist out there and is available to me. I don’t want my melancholy to go any further than myself. I want instead, my certainty to be witnessed and adored and celebrated but also echoed in someone else! So badly!

Everything in one instance can be romantic accidentally. One date you went on once with a friend that you were forced to forget because they didn’t choose you. A drink a stranger bought you. When you say goodbye to your friend and your fingertips touch a bit on the soda you’re sharing. The sunset you watch glimmer on the water and you find yourself dully staring at the way the person next to you looks in the light. A situationship can be made up of several hundred nights of infinite intimate conversation together, even if they weren’t properly contained and bound. These remain in your nervous system for years, stamped onto you forever, a tattoo you can’t remove without a true Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind lobotomy. If you’re lucky, the person who made these moments imprint on you the hardest, will become the person you love forever and marry. It’s as if your house was really dark, but they managed to light some candles to illuminate what’s in it. I get why these little instances can be so powerful.

But what do I do now, since I’ve never seen the flickering of a lamp in the dustiest corners of my self. Yet I have the memory of something sparkly, something shining so intensely at certain points, but no one’s home to turn it back on again. I can turn it on myself, but I can’t see from this angle how it is to be on the outside looking in …

I want to learn how you can turn me on. I want it so badly.

I will keep reading literature again and crying and wondering what’s out there, and who could brave it with me….

Who would brave it, to be in love with me?