KT Walsh
CREATIVE PRODUCER | WRITER | MEDIA RESEARCHER
ARTICLES
"Looking back with a lot less emotion, we were like two puzzle pieces being forced to fit. My fingernails turning white as I pressed them together, just wanting to finish the damn thing so we could get if off the kitchen table."
LOVE, TRUE or FALSE?
By: KT Walsh | 2011
How DO you know it’s true love and not false love? There is a more than enough written, sung, and produced about true love, but no one really can give a definition. Even our most reliable internet source, Wikipedia (wink), doesn’t define true love in real terms, but rather lists film, literature, and music by which it was titled after and then sites a whaler/cargo ship constructed in 1764. The only written meaning I’ve found is, True Love: something girls feel when they have drank too much and something guys fear. Thanks, Urban Dictionary for the attempt.
To make the subject even more confusing, a lot of folks say there is a difference between loving someone and being in love with someone. Then there is the addendum to this by saying you can fall out of love with someone you are in love with. Also, some people have been known to announce a disclaimer: there is more than one true love for everyone. This sort-of negates any outlandish statements professed in previous relationships that turned sour and gives divorcées hope. Hey, guys! Let’s make up our minds already! Love… true or false?
My boyfriend and I had been together for about three years, ripening for a marriage proposal. This was long enough to assume making plans a month in advance was perfectly reasonable. I started brainstorming couples costumes for halloween. What’s better than a Willy Wonka accompanied by an Oompa Loompa? Starting the first of September and not a second later, I flooded his inbox with suggestions. Will you please be the bacon to my eggs? The bolt to my nut? The Fred to my Wilma? The spoon to my fork? The Ken to my Barbie? Not exactly a subtle approach.
He darted the issue going white as a ghost when I brought it up. I cooked him dinner every night. There was no escaping me. Somewhere between October 10th and my list of 101 famous movie couples, he broke it off. Sure my Halloween pestering could be blamed, but it might have been building for a while. He uninvited me to his family vacation two months prior and expressed that he loved Springsteen more than me. That’s right, it was Bruce Springsteen not my dreams of the perfect couples costume. Sobbiest story ever. If we weren’t to be Sun Gold Ken and Barbie true love, was it false love?
Like the Swedish duo, Roxette, proclaimed with help of a favorite romantic comedy, it must have been false love, but it’s over now. I too, like Pretty Woman, thought that my life was ending and that true love doesn’t exist.
For a long time I thought it must have been love and we lost it somehow. Looking back with a lot less emotion, we were like two puzzle pieces being forced to fit. My fingernails turning white as I pressed them together, just wanting to finish the damn thing so we could get if off the kitchen table.
That was this relationship, an annoying 3000 piece kitten puzzle sitting on a table for three years with several pieces mixed in from a wildlife 5000-piecer featuring eagles. The whiskers looked more like talons. It was neither pretty nor easy. I was the one who was saying, “This totally fits together, looks just like the picture on the box.”
After listening to some “serious Bruce” on the east coast he proclaimed, “I’ve never seen a kitten like that, there is something seriously wrong with it.” Well, actually he didn’t say anything at all. Not to my face anyway. Like an average millennial he used his text and composed it on an airplane then waited a little too long to give it to me. True love wouldn’t dream of breaking up with me like that, well… true love wouldn’t break up with me at all. Spot on, it was false love, so I’ll spare myself the how and the why.
I think I’ve experienced mostly false love in my time and I’m not so sure true love even exists. I’ve done some historical soul searching and it seems since adolescence I’ve had a pretty grim outlook on romance. A quote from a high school journal reads, “I hate Valentine’s Day, I don’t think you need a holiday to tell someone you love them. I don’t believe in anniversaries, 6 weeks, 4 months or 12 years. A relationship develops over time, and over time relationships can fall apart. People fall in love with titles and statuses instead of other people.” Wow, if seventeen year-old me could have left this observation in a more obvious place, I might not have had my soul spit on when Mr. Wrong-Way-on A-One-Way-Track crushed my future wedding bells.
Maybe true love is exciting, shocking, yet weird and a little gross, like getting your first period. You’ve been warned and you wait for it… you wait for it. You imagine what it would be like, a glamorized womanhood in your head. There have been a couple a false alarms, some spotting and you just want the waiting to be over. Then when you least expect it, on an unassuming bathroom break after homeroom, you look down and know for certain: this must be it, there is no mistaking this. Thankfully, you’re prepared with the proper gear to take care of business You’ve never done this before, so you follow your instincts, worrying about every little thing. You become so flustered you tuck your skirt into your tights as you wander back to class hoping to run into someone trusted to tell them what’s going on in your panties.
Yeah, I bet true love is a lot like that: unannounced, perhaps a little saucy and sort of a relief. So maybe I’m a late bloomer, I just haven’t gotten mine yet. Maybe true love is just as confusing as puberty.