Latinas Love Hard - Intro
My special Valentine’s Day treat to myself and to you is today’s special spread I’ve put together for us.
I asked some of my closest Latina confidants to help me put this together, to share a little bit of their lover girl world with me and with you.
The original prompt I gave my friends, who’ve graciously agreed to be a part of my special edition blog was “tell me your best love story”.
There’s a funny silly phrase on the internet these days that inspired this idea and yeah you guessed it it’s “Latinas love hard”. Because it’s… true.
And okay, you might not want me to explain it away like I always do with analysis but if you don’t understand what that is all about, let me give you the gist.
Basically, I believe the truth that “Latinas love hard” holds lies a lot in our devotion to our loved ones, something that’s taught. We spend most of our time with family, extended and close family and learn that these people are the people we can trust. This is where our love begins. We come from Catholic backgrounds most of the time, a religion dedicated solely to the act of devotion. The undying kind. So now you’ve set up a plan for the way you approach others around you, with a devoted, unwavering kind of love.
For most Latinas, like me, that love blossoms quickly within your friendships growing up. Because you’re not allowed to date so your friends kind of become the first place you experience the things most people would experience dating. Phone calls, constantly hanging out, secrets, dinners, movies, love. They become the people you can always trust.
For me, the friends I had in high school were my first loves in many ways. They were my family. Once we started dating people, we were still each other’s heart. Though we showed the people we dated the kind of sweetness we showed each other, we knew where we built it, so we always knew where it belonged.
So for me, my greatest love story, the love story that no one can ever supersede is the love stories I’ve made with my best friends. First in high school, then my group of friends in college.
I learned this kind of love from my mom. My mother spent so much time with her own friends, throwing parties with them, always on the phone with them, making each other dinner, taking each other to lunch. My house was a place that never felt empty because it was so full of their laughter.
I loved my high school friends. After knowing each other for 6 or 7 years, we did grow apart, especially after I moved away. But I can’t forget the love we built in through the time we’d spend in each other’s family homes, eating our parent’s food. Getting in trouble for laughing through a church service that we only went to to get to spend more time with each other. Driving to concerts together through the snow. Making up dance routines high. Doing each other’s hair and makeup. That’s the kind of love that lit me up. And it set the stage for how much I’d value the other friends I’d make later in my life.
In college, my four roommates I lived with for two years showed me how love grows when you water it. From mornings falling asleep together in the living room, to following each other to parties to try to set each other up with people, to dancing around the kitchen drunk, to holding each other's hands through panic attacks, to drives to Malibu crying to Miley Cyrus songs, to the newspaper pieces we stuck around every inch of the house to remind ourselves of our accomplishments, to throwing up in front of each other, to crying in front of each other, to winning in front of each other, and to being unable to hide from each other.
This was the kind of love that nurtured me. The arms I'd fall into after I'd been tossed by the arms of another and I could always come back to complain about him and her and all of them and they'd just be there ready to tell me to try again. That my heart was not a tarry thing, but a thing that was alive and I should never try to quiet it.
I haven't seen those girls in months, but I carry them with me everywhere. Last week I saw Mira, who I hadn’t seen since August. And she said I looked so much older. And my eyes welled up as she told me she was thinking of moving to Cincinnati. 2,000 miles away from me. And I was sure the next time I saw her, I would be older still. And I realized how it’d hurt to know I wouldn’t wake up to her alarms again or run out to see her from my room at 3 a.m. when she’d be making a cup of tea.
That I wouldn’t get to throw another Valentine’s Day party with her like I had for the past two years. That made me feel hollow.
But when she came to visit last week we sat hidden away from the pouring rain, with a slice of pizza, oblivious to the fact that the restaurant was closing and only let us sit in there because we were laughing and smiling about the love in our life and I realized love would never be something I chased as long as I was always a person I had.
Before she left she said to me quietly, “I don’t know if I’ll ever live here again. But I love Los Angeles, more than I did before.”
To me, that is the meaning of El Dia del Amor y La Amistad. As they call it in Mexico, the day of love and friendship.
Love, in all it's form is a force that teaches us new things. I've learned from my stories, and I've laughed and cried and smiled through the love stories of others. So I wanted to show you some of these stories from my dear friends, Xio and Arantza.
To loving hard!
Happy Valentine’s Day.
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