Michigan in Color
8 — Wednesday, February 22, 2023

How to love

Alas, the (socially constructed) 
season of love is here. I always ques-
tion what love is and how to practice 
it. The conceptualization of love as a 
verb, instead of just a noun, is promi-
nent in our everyday language. This 
is because love is an all-encompass-
ing concept. 
Like many, my first experiences 
with love came from family. It was 
at home that I learned to differenti-
ate between what love felt like and 
what it didn’t. Love felt empower-
ing. Everything not serving my emo-
tional well-being felt disheartening. 
Love encompassed unconditional 
care, protection and a willingness to 
give. My immigrant parents always 
cared for me in the way they knew 
— no late nights out, no talking to 
strangers and no ignoring their calls. 
I never questioned their authority 
because I understood their love lan-
guage was — to an extent — shaped 
by generational trauma. I did, how-
ever, question what love was as I 
accessed the mass media, and rela-
tionships with my friends became 
more complicated. I recall seeing 
my friends and their parents inter-
act like they were their best friends, 
sharing secrets and gossiping, and I 
wondered why my relationship with 
my parents wasn’t like that. Spe-
cifically, I recall when my friends 
judged me for having parents that 
didn’t let me sleep over. Those expe-
riences forced me to reevaluate what 
I knew of love. 
Too many times, I wanted to 
share my troubling thoughts about 
school and friends with my par-
ents. However, the cultural barriers 
between my immigrant parents and 

me forced me to look for another 
source of love and understanding. 
I had to acknowledge that their 
conceptualization of love was influ-
enced by a different time and place, 
foreign to modern American soci-
ety’s standards. My parents showed 
me their love, but at times they could 
not understand my frustrations 
about my friendships or grades. 
During those times of uncertainty 
and loneliness, I envied those with 
siblings. My friends complained 
about their siblings, but I never 
understood why they wouldn’t want 
someone close to their age to talk to. 
So — without realizing it — I went on 
a quest for other sources of love. 
In high school, I learned to love 
friends, and I even found romance. 
Quickly, I learned that love is not 
uniform. The platonic and romantic 
relationships I was in taught me that 
my loving habits were fundamen-
tally different than others. At times, 
the love I poured into relationships 
was not reciprocated — convincing 
me that I was not worthy of love. 
People asked, “Why do you care so 
much?” forcing me to question if I 
knew how to love. 
As children, we are never explic-
itly told what love is. We may have 
first encountered love at home with 
those who cared for us from birth. 
For others, that love may have been 
absent. What is often not said is 
that the current ways in which we 
show and receive love are due to our 
learned behavior throughout the 
years. Throughout our childhood, 
we are exposed to our parents’ hab-
its, either healthy or unhealthy. 
Developmental psychology argues 
that parental behavior significantly 
influences our social, emotional and 
cognitive 
development. 
Because 
our parents are the first people we 

learn about love from, we are prone 
to mirror their habits. Hence, the 
million-dollar question of how I love 
forces me to consider how my child-
hood impacted my perceptions of 
love. 
My quest on how to love is con-
tinuous. My experiences in college 
have made me reflect on how my 
parents showed me love and didn’t. 
For example, I never saw physical 
touch as a love language until I got to 
college. People would casually hug 
me, and I felt uneasy. Upon reflec-
tion, I realize that uneasiness stems 
from the lack of physical touch from 
my parents and other family mem-
bers. I will never resent them for 
that as it is always important for me 
to acknowledge that they loved me 
in the way they knew best. So, as 
I reflect on how I show my love to 
others, I keep in mind that there are 
habits I need to learn and unlearn. 
Thankfully, I’ve had the privilege to 
develop friendships that revolution-
ized my conceptualization of love. 
Joining a multicultural sorority 
was an experience I never thought 
I needed. As someone who did not 
experience the love of a sibling, I was 
eager to find out how a sisterhood 
would impact me. Since joining, 
I’ve found that the bonds I created 
with other women were necessary 
for my personal nourishment. The 
late-night runs to 7-Eleven, the 
spontaneous hangouts and talking 
in circles. The bonding experiences 
were foreign to me, but their empha-
sis on trust and love made my inner 
lonesome child feel the warmth. I 
was freely able to pour myself into 
my sorority sisters, fulfilling the 
emptiness I felt in those times when 
I needed someone else to love. They 
taught me how to be a woman who 
is able to receive and give love. Their 

affirmations when I felt at my lowest 
reminded me that my love language 
should never be seen as “needy” or 
“too much.” Throughout my time 
in the sisterhood, I’ve learned two 
lessons about love: (1) the love you 
give to yourself is just as important 
as the love you give to others, and (2) 
unconditional love requires a com-
mitment to constructive struggle 
and transformation. 
Everyday encounters with my 

friends and others remind me of 
the continued struggle to learn how 
to love. As I continue to question 
love languages, it is vital for me to 
commit to an ongoing process of 
transformation. We can never stop 
learning how to love because we 
encounter different experiences and 
people every day. Love languages 
differ, but the commitment to show 
love should never be up to question. 
We are growing to be cynical about 

love. A lot of people believe that 
love does not exist, but if you look 
closer at the way you interact with 
the world, you will notice that love 
is everywhere. Love is in how you 
choose to show up for yourself and 
in school. Love is in the warm smiles 
you get from your friends every day. 
Love is everywhere, and we must be 
willing to learn how to love. 

LUZ MAYANCELA
MiC Columnist

Luz Mayancela/MiC

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Why I slept at 3

Reminders 
To the Ocean, 
My deepest apologies for 
judging, you didn’t 
lash out at 
those helpless sailors,
you were writhing.

a tide of cool 
blue currents washes down 
my spine, as
fingers dance a 
mindless waltz through 
my hair.
A transmitter relaying, 
across seas of hopeful stars,
the universe’s message
loud and clear.

But maybe I adjusted the frequency,
and never felt that punch 
without a swing, 
feeling it bore through 
my chest, seeking out my soul.

The soul It once protected, It:
the statue I used to
stare at from the banister, wondering 
why Periamma had chosen it to 
guard her front door,
a laughing Buddha 
buoyantly chiseled, warmth 
emanating from his smile.
But broken out
from the stone pedestal,
It unfurls into a tower, casting
shadows over town and mountain 
alike
lunging forward to fill its maw, gorg-
ing 
on my innards, a feast of 
my flesh and bones, 
teeth gnashing, eyes 
a lustful green

weighing down the scale
weighing me down to the floor

Which I slip through,
into midnight streets
all that existed 
was you and me
our laughs
warmed the air

floating on frostbitten breeze

that carried us in
to the computer lab,
watching shows on the board
as I battled against the pain
emanating from my sleeping legs,
afraid it would disturb
the warm gold vines that
slowly encircled us,
And when Joyce
walked in 
to clean 
on her graveyard shift,
that never prevented her from 
sitting with me for
sitting with me for
a few minutes,
we jump apart, 
bashfully innocent,
cheeks ablaze.

Cycles
When the wildflower
peaks out its head,
icy memories shudder,
and melt in
flames of Spring again.

Yet winter comes,
and the only heat
is from staring 
into the hearth,
and the comforter on my bed.

It’s no easy feat,
walking through the snow,
while the ghost of the sun
lingers in my chest— 
So I convince my mind 
Spring will never come.

Yet when I least expect it,
I see a blossom.
And my well-trodden road
is worn once more
oblivious the tempest
will soon rage

I avoid the chill
in the solace of my bed,
insulated by the
heat of another.

Nonetheless,
I ask myself, 
Why am I dreaming 
of the Wildflower?

KUVIN SATYADEV
MiC Columnist

Premarital eye contact and 
its consequences

My friend told me a few days 
ago that I look like someone who 
has never been in love. I stared 
at the straight line of her mouth 
and blinked because that was all I 
could do. She said it with the same 
tone she would use to tell me that I 
have two eyes and two lips and two 
nostrils. The facts of my life and my 
love are obvious to her, somehow, 
and as unsettled as I was by this, 
I knew that she had never been in 
love either. That truth was written 
somewhere in the space between 
her eyebrows, in the greenish 
veins underneath the thin skin of 
her face. My friend is a pale green, 
the color of a matcha latte with too 
much milk and sugar that tastes 
good anyway, which may be why 
she is my friend. My green is darker. 
Both of us are crisp and young, our 
inexperience fresh like kale and let-
tuce. 
In the Hallmark movies my 
mother watches, love finds protag-
onists easily and predictably. The 
few sharp edges around a relation-
ship are cured by a kiss in swirling 
styrofoam snow. For me, love is 
“Christmas in July.” It is performa-
tive, unreal, intangible. It exists on 
a screen, carefully constructed for 
two straight Midwestern WASPs 
who only wear ugly flannel and 
boots that never seem broken in. It 
will never be real for me. 
In the old Bollywood movies I 
watch with my mother, people also 
fall in love simply. All they have to 
do is lock eyes before they decide 
they will die for each other. Their 
love is incongruous with what I 
grew up seeing in my Indian com-
munity, marred by arranged mar-
riages and domestic strife. My 
mother spends hours on the phone 
talking to women her age, all com-

plaining about their husbands. 
Some of them have husbands that 
beat them and others have hus-
bands that beat their kids and most 
of them have husbands that never 
put dirty plates in the sink. Having 
a husband is hell but they all ask 
when my eldest sister will get mar-
ried so that she can suffer too. None 
of us know what a marriage is sup-
posed to look like. 
I don’t know what eros looks like, 
either, not in real life. My friends 
describe their partners and roman-
tic encounters to me and I feel like 
I’m watching mating rituals in an 
aquarium. Bathed in blue light, 
I watch as they dance and cling 
to each other, my own face mir-
rored on the glass and disrupting 
my view. There is tenderness and 
care in their dance but also a sort of 
desperation. They’ll die if they stop 
dancing. Anything, even something 
awful, is better than loneliness. In 
her essay Bluets, Maggie Nelson 
writes, “Loneliness is solitude with 
a problem.” Everyone in this aquar-
ium is lonely, crushed by hundreds 
of meters of water above us. 
The worst loneliness I’ve ever 
experienced was on the third floor 
of East Quad, sequestered in a dorm 
room during the winter semester of 
2021. We had not yet gotten vac-
cinated. The Diag was gray and 
empty and my cheeks were always 
cold. During the daytime, I slept 
on the bed reserved for napping, 
and when I couldn’t sleep, I stared 
at the ceiling with dry eyes. I went 
days without speaking to anyone. 
That time did something irrevo-
cable to me, something I to this day 
can’t explain. It feels as if someone 
peeled back layers of my skin and 
stitched a hermit into me. 
Another friend — this one is 
electric blue — had a recent and 
brief obsession with online tarot 
readings. We picked cards that 
told us our fortune on her screen, 

the unrelenting fluorescent lights 
of the CCCB basement blurring 
moments into hours. Most of the 
quizzes involved picking six cards, 
and I always somehow ended up 
getting the hermit, a gray guy that 
looks like Gandalf. My electric blue 
friend always picked the magician, 
the talented face of Gandalf. The 
internet algorithms might have 
been looking at the lines in our faces 
through her laptop camera, under-
standing the truths that are written 
there. The online tarot told me that 
my current circumstances barred 
me from finding love. Not now, it 
seemed to say, not ever. Afterward, 
I opened Co-Star, which tells me 
that I’m having trouble with “love,” 
a fun fact that it tells me every day. 
I’ve known my electric blue 
friend since middle school and 
we’ve oscillated between best 
friends and acquaintances ever 
since, depending on our sched-
ules. She can take one look at me 
and know when I’m too tired to 
function, even though my eye bags 
always look the same. When I look 
at her, I think of the 12-year-old 
that used to help me with my pre-
algebra homework. In college, she 
told me about sleeping with the boy 
that she loves, and my head started 
buzzing as if she had just poured 
Pop Rocks in my ears. We are chil-
dren, I thought through the crack-
le. We are barely 13. 
When I was 6, I thought I would 
fall in love for the first time in high 
school. All I did was develop crush-
es on ugly libertarians. 
I know that it isn’t love that I 
want, but attention. I confessed to 
being a narcissist to my friend over 
the phone recently. “I just want 
someone to tie my shoelaces,” I 
said, because I had just seen a show 
where the man gets on his knees 
to tie his girlfriend’s shoes. He ties 
them and remains like that — at her 
feet, on his knees, head bowed — 
for a few seconds, crying because 
they are breaking up. It’s all very 
romantic and sad and blue-black. 
He notices her shoelaces even as 
he is leaving her. His attention to 
detail is unmatched because he is 
not a real person. He never will be. 
The friend on the other line is a 
smooth slate gray in an unnerving 
and calming way. Last semester, we 
created a character named Mack 
and tried to convince our other 
friends he was real. Mack was Irish 
Catholic and had a poster of Jesus 
on the ceiling above his bed. He 
carried around a pocket Bible with 
sticky pages and whitish stains. He 
didn’t have an Instagram associat-
ed with his name because he want-
ed to seem unplugged and sexy, and 

girls fell for it. Our friends believed 
Mack was real. Mack was Franken-
stein’s monster, a collection of the 
worst traits we could think of in 
men stitched together into a single 
idiotic form. We loved Mack as all 
mothers love their awful, evil sons. 
Time is moving so fast that I feel 
as though Mack was born years 
ago, even though my slate-gray 
friend and I birthed him in Octo-
ber, when I was just freshly 20. My 
body is aging faster than my mind, 
which is still sluggish like a child’s. 
I accidentally laughed at a couple 
cupping each other’s faces in the 
Fishbowl recently. They were grab-
bing each other like one of them 
was about to go off to war. Their 
passion seemed ridiculous at the 
time, but maybe it is revolutionary 
to love in a sea of monitors and stu-
dent depression. 
I’ve thought about love more in 
the past few months than I have in 
my entire life. Maybe it’s because 
of Valentine’s Day or maybe it’s 
because I’m getting older and my 
mom is telling me to join Muslim 
Students Association to find a part-
ner or maybe it’s because I’m listen-
ing to too many love songs titled 
“Love Song.” Maybe it’s because 
all my classes surround love and 
divinity and conjugation; authors 
say that this is what gives life. This 
is far removed from my studies of 
science, where life boils down to 
four simple letters of A, T, C and G, 
where life-conferring elements are 
not a lover’s breath but carbon and 
oxygen. 
In the lab where I work, we are 
trying to grow bacteria to kill and 
see how much virus it takes to 
make them die. The liquid bacterial 
culture is supposed to be a pale tur-
bid green, close to the color of my 
friend who is a matcha latte. They 
don’t grow well unless they’re on 
a shaking plate, rocked like a baby 
in its mother’s arms. Those micro-
organisms are from the ocean and 
accustomed to the currents of the 
waves. They will grow asexually 
until we infect them and pray that 
they die. But that isn’t to say there’s 
no point. 
When I get home every night, I 
wrap my arms around my honey-
pink roommate. For five seconds, 
she squeezes me back. She knows 
how important that temporary 
pressure on my ribs is for my soul. 
When I go to bed, I’ll dream about 
marrying someone I made eye con-
tact with weeks ago and wake up in 
cold sweats. Eros is illusory, night-
marish, sinful. I won’t be able to go 
back to sleep, the red light of the 
rising sun already peeking through 
my blinds.

SAFURA SYED
MiC Managing Editor

Rita Sayegh/MiC

Safura Syed/MiC