You're Supposed to Make Love Songs

A few days ago I posted a poem I was trying to flesh out on my Instagram story. Something about a woman returning to a man’s hands to find herself. I was kind of inspired by a conversation I had with a friend about why it is that girls so often return to their exes even when the love is gone and there’s nothing really to come back to. But sometimes you return because you feel like you left a part of yourself there.

So, whether you realize or not, you are returning not for anything he could give you. You are searching for you. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about women and their relationship to love. I started to think about it because of love songs.

There are so many. So many we have bonded over with girl friends and screamed and cried to alone. 

They are release. But it’s just not only about love.

I sat one day puzzled thinking about the catalogs of a lot of artists I liked. And I felt envious that I had never written a love song. I’d written songs about heartache and jealousy, but never about heartbreak or love. And love songs are my favorite. 

I shuffled through my favorite love songs and noticed the feelings certain lyrics gave me. I looked at them strewn in front of me. I pulled them up on my phone. And I started to feel like these songs weren’t even about love. They were about anger, loathing, voids, self-esteem. They were about everything a woman feels, but they were hardly ever about another person. 

I read a book recently about rage. The author said something along the lines of how womens anger is usually pushed into other contexts of her life where it is acceptable, into sadness, anxiety, self-esteem, and depression. She turns it inward.

She places her anger at her condition back into herself because there no one can see it. 

There are few situations where she is allowed to feel loudly. Where she’s allowed to feel pain and scream about it and want to destroy about it. That is when a woman feels love.

Love has become the scapegoat for anything else we may feel. Because men can’t understand why it is that we would feel anger or hurt or jealousy if it didn’t have anything to do with them.

It is acceptable to feel anger and immense pain if it is about a man. It is acceptable to want to die over a man. To hate yourself over a man. To want less or more for yourself over a man. To feel broken over a man. 

Everything else well not so much.

So all these things we feel we blame on love. We’ve been taught that love is the only place where we are allowed to feel, so our whole life becomes an endeavor to be inside of love. 

After work, you put on any song and it’s about love. And you feel stressed and overwhelmed and you’re singing it and crying but it’s not always the story you are crying over. It’s about the way the artist is singing the words that are building and building to release tension and you collapse when the notes do. 

I still hope someday I write a love song. But it’s not like I’ll be lacking in things to write about any time soon. Love should be something like anything. 

I am devoted to devoting myself to my World. 

I made a joke once to someone when they asked me who my song “I Know What It’s Like” was about. And I said “well all of my songs are about me”.

And now I kind of feel like they are.