Modern Love Is War
I forget strangers’ faces almost immediately—faster than I remember addresses or phone numbers. If someone connects with me mentally, challenges me, or grabs my attention visually, sure, I light up in the moment. But after we part, there’s a solid chance I won’t recognize them next time. They just slip away.
Then there’s the one person who doesn’t.
That one person has been in my head for weeks, months, maybe longer. I can’t solve it. Their face burned itself into my skull. The smell of them hits like adrenaline. Their voice does something fucked up to my body—makes me want to come and simultaneously want to throw up. The butterflies died a long time ago. Now there’s just chaos in my gut.
Modern love isn’t what it used to be. It’s not the Bravo photo love stories, not ice cream dates and movie theaters and roses in some candlelit bed where everything ends in textbook sex. Modern love is war. And I don’t get to sit it out—I either fight it or it breaks me.
I don’t feel close to the other person anymore. My own mind tortures me in every possible way, and it doesn’t give a shit about dragging this obsession back to normal. It’s not sadness. It’s not grief. It’s not emptiness. It’s some mutated thing built from my own mistakes, the chances I missed, thoughts so fucked up I’d never tell a therapist because they’d lock me away on some green hill somewhere.
I know the rules. I know what I’m supposed to do. I understand the balance between attraction and indifference, I’ve learned from past failures, I know what’s allowed and what isn’t. But when that one person shows up—that specific, cursed person—logic gets overrun. My heart takes the wheel and my body starts moving without permission.
I think I’m helping. I think I’ve changed, learned, grown. I want to love and celebrate and support them, even though I know deep down that every move makes it worse. I’ve shaped them, built them up with my hands and my hope, invested my whole future in them. And then someone new walks in—untouched, unchained, vital as a storm—and takes what I was building. Moves into their body and their head like they own it. And I just scream silently and die inside and finally understand that I should have left a long time ago.
But I couldn’t. Modern love demands the impossible. It fucks me, tortures me, punishes every attempt to be normal. It gives me fantasies of a better world. It puts thoughts in my head when I’m on the train. I remember how their skin tasted. How they smelled. The moment they let themselves fall. That one moment—I want to live in it forever.
I’m part of a generation drowning in oversaturation, bored with everything after a few minutes, scrolling through my life from one thing to the next. So it makes no sense that I become so utterly dependent on one other person, that every attempt to be cool about it, to say fuck it
like I do with everything else, just results in me screaming silently to death while going in circles. Sometimes worse—sometimes I don’t even want to escape. I’m just broken in that way.
There’s this ancient rule that governs all of this: the more you want something, the less you get it. The inverse is equally true. The harder I try to remember a face, a name, a moment, the more strangers flood in—a crowd of characters I can’t pin down or rank. But the moment I try to force your face into that crowd and move on, the moment I try to delete you from my head, your ghost follows me everywhere. Every small thing brings you back.
I know I’ll only breathe again when your face is just one among many. Someone I like or don’t like, someone I’m indifferent to. Someone who doesn’t turn me into a psychotic time bomb every time something reminds me of you. I’m working on a solution. When I figure it out, I’ll let you know. Until then I’m leaning hard on the three As—alcohol, distraction, and anal sex—and hoping that someday a rock, a piano, or a car hits me hard enough in the head that I gain superhuman control over my own thoughts. That would be incredible.