The Less Loving One

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

- "The More Loving One" by W. H. Auden

She had wondered, when she was in high school, if she was gay. She would have been fine with it if she was. She had a couple of friends who were gay, and one who was bisexual, and even if people sometimes muttered slurs at them, they seemed happy enough for the most part. Her parents would have been surprised, of course, but she was certain they’d never do anything like disown her or kick her out for it, and they would probably come around to accept it eventually. They were fairly liberal, after all.

It would have made sense, too, Olivia thought. She had never had a crush on a boy. All her other girl friends had. She still remembered the day back in fifth grade when Katie C. kept her face hidden in her hands after getting partnered to work with Dylan on a project, and when Olivia asked Katie P. what was wrong, because Katie P. was Katie C.’s best friend, she had explained that Katie C. was embarrassed because she had a huge crush on Dylan. Olivia still doesn’t understand it, if she’s being honest with herself. She had never been the type to think boys were gross or that they had cooties, but she’d never been the type to get embarrassed and shy around them, either; she was just indifferent about them as a whole.

As she grew into middle school, though, she began to wonder if maybe cooties were real, since everyone seemed to catch them but her. Suddenly everyone had a crush on everyone else, and there were even some “couples” who would hold hands at lunchtime and act like one of them was being shipped off to war whenever they had to separate to go to different classes. Normally, Olivia could keep out of any romantic business and talk about more important things like classwork or art club or video games, but sometimes - mainly at slumber parties - she’d get talked into a game like Never Have I Ever or Truth or Dare and suddenly she would feel like an alien pretending to be a thirteen-year-old girl. More than once, she’d felt so nauseous at the mere idea of playing one of those games that as soon as a girl mentioned it, she had called her mom to come pick her up.

So, when she had found out in tenth grade that Grace Xiao - who was at that point only a distant friend who Olivia sat next to in history class - was a lesbian, Olivia had wondered if maybe she was, too. She’d awkwardly brought it up one day while the two of them were meant to be working on a history assignment, asking Grace things like how she knew and what it felt like. Grace hadn’t known how to answer that last one, shrugging and saying, “I dunno, it feels normal, I guess? It’s like liking boys, only it’s girls instead.” She had gone on talking about how it made more sense to like girls anyway, since they dressed better and smelled better, but Olivia had tuned her out by then. She wondered what normal was meant to feel like.

It took her until her freshman year of college to realize that, though she’d still never had a crush on a boy, she’d never had a crush on a girl, either.

Despite that, she decided to try dating in college, and it was alright. She met some interesting people, and some horrible people, and some people she had nothing in common with at all. She tried dating boys and girls; tried meeting people at bars and on dating apps and through mutual friends; tried accepting when people asked her out and tried asking out people who she thought it might be nice to date.

She’d still never had a crush on anyone. She wasn’t gay, she realized. She thought maybe she’d be happier if she was. Instead, she was just… nothing.

She met Jason through school. He was majoring in foreign relations, just like her, and so they’d had quite a few classes together, and he always seemed nice. It wasn’t until their senior year that they started talking about more than just the content of their lessons. They turned out to be quite similar - both only children, interested in art just enough for it to be a hobby rather than a career, with similar political ideals and goals caught in between wanting to save the world and wanting to earn enough money to pay off their student loans. Olivia liked him well enough, so she asked him to get coffee. Maybe this time, she told herself, she would grow feelings for him.

She tried her best to love Jason. He was, she realized, the ideal guy. He was sweet, and funny, and he brought her soup when she was sick. He was smart and had secured a good job even before they graduated. His parents liked her and her parents thought Olivia couldn’t have made a better choice in men. He was attractive, and they matched well together, and Jason loved her with everything that he was.

He told her that he loved her on that first Valentine’s Day after they started dating. He had gotten reservations at a restaurant that had cloth napkins and candlesticks on the tables and Olivia had felt even as they got seated that it was coming. He didn’t say it until he was dropping her off at her apartment door, not staying the night because he knew she had an early class the next morning. He was classy, so he didn’t try to pressure her into letting him in.

She doesn’t remember hearing him say the actual words, but she knows that she said them back somehow. Then, she kissed him goodnight and closed the door, and then went into the bathroom and threw up.

He said it all the time after that, and each instance twisted Olivia’s stomach tighter and tighter in her gut until it was coiled so tightly that everything she was keeping inside came out after having just one drink with her roommate Julie one night.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me!” Olivia had sobbed into her roommate’s consoling shoulder. “He’s perfect! I just- I want to love him, so why can’t I?”

“Oh, honey,” Julie sighed, gently stroking Olivia’s hair. “Maybe he’s just not The One. We can’t choose who we love, after all.”

“But why not?” Olivia demanded to know, like she was a petulant toddler trying to understand the chaos of the world.

Julie couldn’t tell Olivia the answer to that. No one could.

She should have expected him to propose. They had been dating for four years, had moved in together after two of them. They’d spent Christmas and Thanksgiving with each other’s families. They’d gone on vacation together to Cancun.

He pops the question when they’re having a picnic in the park one Sunday afternoon. Olivia is enjoying some of the strawberries Jason had packed when she looks over and sees him opening the ring box in her direction.

At least he doesn’t try to make a big production of it. It would have only embarrassed them both when Olivia spends a full minute frozen in shock before reaching out and closing the box in Jason’s hand, shaking her head and stammering out an apology.

“I’m sorry,” Olivia says. Part of her feels indignant about the apology, because she doesn’t think she should have to say it. But she is sorry, regardless, and so she lets Jason know.

“I don’t understand,” he says. He’s still just sitting there in front of her, the maroon velvet jewelry box in his hand, but Olivia swears whenever she blinks it looks like he’s standing there with his own bloody heart in his hand, pumping out its last few beats because it can’t live outside a chest and she’s refused to give it home in hers.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats. “But I don’t-”

“You don’t…”

“I can’t,” she edits, because that difference feels important. “I wish I could, but I-”

“But I love you,” he says. “And I thought we were-”

“I know,” she tells him. “But I… don’t. I can’t. I meant to…” Meant to let him down earlier, but she can’t bring herself to say that. She can’t jab a knife into that already-dying heart. She isn’t that cruel. Maybe she is cruel for all of what she’s done to him, but not that cruel. “I’m sorry.” Why can’t she stop saying that? She doesn’t want to say it. It’s not her fault. She had tried to love him.

“What do you mean you can’t?” he asks, finally catching that part.

“I just- I can’t,” she tries to explain. “Love you, that is. I mean, I tried, but I-”

“So when you said- You were just lying, this whole time?” His voice breaks, and Olivia hates herself just a bit more than she did the moment before.

“It wasn’t a lie, really,” she says, even though that is, in itself, a lie. “It was more like… a wish?”

“A wish,” he echoes, voice flat. He shakes his head slowly. “Are you…?” he trails off, and she guesses what he intended and shakes her head.

“No, I’m not,” she says. “I’m not- I don’t think I’m anything.” It makes sense and yet it’s complete nonsense to both of them. “I’ve never-” There’s something heavy in her throat, and she swallows around it. She wants nothing more than to leave.

“Never…?” he asks.

“I’ve never felt- not for anyone,” she explains. That heavy thing in her throat is still there, refusing to be swallowed. It makes it hard for her to breathe.

“I have to go,” she tells him. Maybe it’s cruel, but she knows she is, and maybe she was wrong earlier; maybe she is that cruel. Maybe that’s why she has to leave. Maybe that’s why she did all of this to him in the first place.

As she goes, she sees that heart of his bleeding out over his hand and onto the checkered fabric of their picnic blanket. Yes, I’m cruel to leave him like this, she thinks. Her heart, which has never felt anything for anyone, breaks. How is it fair for her heart to be able to break but not love? Well, at least it proves she had a heart in the first place, doesn’t it?

She doesn’t want to go home after she leaves him in the park. She’s worried that she’ll go there and be able to hear the beat of Jason’s bloody heart under her floorboards like in that Edgar Allen Poe story she’d read in her tenth-grade English class. She didn’t kill him, sure, but what she did do might have been worse.

So, she wanders. She comes across a movie theater and goes inside. In an act of what she suspects may be masochism, she buys a ticket for the new release of some cheesy romantic comedy. She watches it and expects to feel regret for turning down Jason’s proposal and for ending the four-year-long relationship between them. All she feels is relief.

She watches the characters on screen fall in love with each other. She knows it’s all fiction, but she feels certain their love is realer than she is.

She stays with Julie while she’s looking for an apartment of her own. Julie hadn’t been surprised when Olivia showed up and explained about the proposal.

“I’m not going to say ‘I told you so,’” Julie says as she brings a cup of tea over to Olivia on the couch. “But I still don’t know why you stayed with him so long in the first place.”

Olivia takes the tea just to feel the warmth of it in her hands. “I was hoping that I could… I dunno… figure out eventually that I loved him,” she explains weakly.

“I don’t think that’s how it works, Liv. If he’s not The One, he’s not The One.”

Olivia sips her tea and scalds her tongue. “What if I don’t have one?” she asks after a little while.

“Don’t have one what?”

“Don’t have a One,” Olivia clarifies. “What if I don’t have a The One?” It’s the question that has plagued her since high school, and she’s finally able to say it out loud.

“Honey, I know right now you’re upset, but there’s plenty of other guys out there,” Julie explains, putting a comforting hand on Olivia’s shoulder. “You’ll find him eventually. You just can’t give up. Plenty of fish in the sea, right?”

Olivia finds herself suddenly angry. “I’m not asking what if I don’t find him,” she says, shrugging off Julie’s hand. “I’m asking, what if he doesn’t exist at all? What if I’m just broken and there isn’t anyone out there for me?”

“Liv, just because Jason-“

“Forget Jason!” Olivia yells, slamming her mug onto the coffee table and standing up from the couch. She begins to pace the living room, feeling too wild for the small apartment. “This isn’t- It’s not just about him!”

Julie’s looking at her in concern, eyebrows furrowed. “Liv, honey,” she says gently. Olivia thinks it’s the kind of voice someone might use to try and convince a kidnapper not to hurt a hostage, or to talk a jumper away from the ledge of a building. “I’m confused here. What are we talking about?”

“I just- There’s something wrong with me,” Olivia explains. “I’ve never… I’ve never actually liked someone. Never had a crush on anyone. Definitely never been in love with them. I’ve always just been… faking it.” It feels good to say it all out loud, to admit it outside of her own head where it’s spent years echoing louder and louder, and so she feels a bit more relaxed now.

But Julie is quiet for so long afterwards that Olivia starts to talk more out of anxiousness.

“I even wondered for a while if I might be gay, because I never liked any guys, but I never liked any girls either, so it’s more like I’m just some kind of- of robot who tricks everyone into thinking I’m human like them, and someone just forgot to tell me that I’m not human, so this is how I find out because the only human thing robots can’t do is love. Or maybe- maybe everyone else is faking it when they talk about having crushes and falling for someone because they think that’s what everyone else expects them to do, and I’m the only one who never got the memo that you have to pretend about all that, so I’m the weird one even though there’s actually no such thing as crushes or romance and really I’m completely normal, not some loveless, unfeeling robot freak.”

Olivia is aware that she’s rambling, and that her rambling is making Julie look even more concerned for her, so she forces herself to stop.

“Well…” Julie finally says, like she’s just trying to fill the silence while she still thinks of how to respond. “I… had no idea you were, uh, going through all of that.”

Olivia realizes that she’s breathing hard from the adrenaline of letting go of everything she’s been holding inside, and she also realizes that she’s crying.

Julie stands and pulls her into a hug, and then Olivia is sobbing, and Julie doesn’t seem to mind that she’s soaking the shoulder of her t-shirt with tears and snot. She continues to hold her, rubbing gentle circles on her back.

When Olivia’s sobs have finally quieted to sniffles, Julie tells her, “You’re not a robot, Liv.”

“How do you know?” Olivia mumbles into Julie’s damp shoulder.

“Well, aside from all of the clear biological reasons,” Julie says, “you’re wrong. You can love.”

Olivia pulls back to give Julie a defiant look. “But I can’t, that’s the problem,” she insists. “Were you even-“

“Have you ever told your mom and dad that you love them?” Julie questions, interrupting her.

“Well… yeah,” Olivia answers.

“Did you mean it?”

“Yeah, but-“

“And when I got you that set of fancy art markers for your birthday last year and you said, and I quote, ‘oh my god, Julie, I love you’ - were you lying then?”

“No, of course not, but-“

“So clearly you can love.”

“But that’s different!” Olivia insists, pulling out of Julie’s arms and crossing her own over her chest like that might stop her from feeling so hollow. “I still can’t- I still don’t have a The One, or anyone I like, or anything like that.”

“Maybe there’s a chance you don’t have one,” Julie concedes. Olivia isn’t sure Julie actually believes her about it, though. It feels like she’s just placating her. “But the point is, you can love. You do love. And if I had to choose between having one soul-mate level partner and having a bunch of friends and family I love, I know which one I’d pick.”

Olivia sighs. She lets Julie steer her back to the couch and sit her down and hug her again. She doesn’t point out that nobody ever actually has to pick between those two options, they just get to have both. Except for her, that is.

“There’s so much more to life than love and dating,” Julie continues.

Olivia suddenly thinks of the song All You Need Is Love by the Beatles and hears it playing in her head. It feels ironic. “I guess,” she mumbles, though she doesn’t agree with Julie.

Just a couple of hours ago, she was convinced she actually had a heart because it had broken. Now, she isn’t so sure. What if she really was an alien or a robot or just some kind of broken, heartless human being? How would she even know? She’s tempted to crack open her own rib cage just to be able to see that she has a beating heart inside it. Even if she could never give it to someone else, never house someone’s heart there in return, at least she would know she only felt as if there was an endless, empty cavern inside of her.

When Julie leaves the room to change into a shirt that hadn’t been cried on, Olivia tries to feel a heart beating in her chest, a pulse in her veins, any sign at all that she’s not just empty inside.

But she doesn’t feel a thing.