Love Mentorship Gone Wrong
I can always tell what kind of romantic phase I’m in based on who my love role models are. Which relationships - real or fictional - am I aspiring to? Who are the archetypes I’m pursuing or modeling my own behavior on? Whose love life do I want when I grow up?
In 2007, approaching my senior year of college, I wanted to be Elizabeth Gilbert. Eat Pray Love had a huge affect on me, on how I viewed relationships and the twin flames of self fulfillment and romantic love intertwined. I read the book before it truly exploded in popularity and since then, Eat Pray Love went through the full life cycle of popularity to cliche to cringe. It’s hard to look back on this text as foundational as it was for me without cringing. But it was a very real thread for me (and turned me into a fan of so much of her fiction). I resonate deeply with her perspective as a student of her own life.
While Gilbert may have been a love role model at a tender moment of my life, I also saw the cautionary tale in her experience. And now, I see the stark contrast between the choices she made and the ones I have and would make in relationships. Where she is codependent, I am borderline too independent. While she gleefully throws caution to the wind to feel the heady cocktail of hormones from the intensity of a romantic relationship, I am terrified by it, and at times, deeply distrustful of those thoughts and feelings within myself.
Gilbert has always been messy and a self described romantic and love addict. She made headlines again for her relationship when she divorced her 2nd husband (the Love from EPL fame) to have a short lived relationship with her best friend. She just released a memoir about this time period and shines an incredibly vulnerable light on the very messy, destructive, toxic behind-the-scenes of that relationship.
In some ways, I long to love with her abandon. I envy the ability to continuously leap with faith, no matter how many times you’ve fallen. Writing to try to figure out the “why” behind it all. Jia Tolentino’s book review of Gilbert’s memoir is perhaps the perfect companion piece to underscore this sense of wildness. I cultivate it, I fear it in myself, I envy it in others. It is the superpower I’m terrified to activate. It is the mysterious tunnel I am pertried to step into.
I’m not sure what will become of me, but adding a bit of revision to my own lens by reading someone else’s adventures in the land of love can only be additive to my own nuance as I trudge forward in the forest.
