Thalia Huntley

First, let me just say that I love “love.” Cliche? Probably. But I do, and that’s as succinct as I can be about it. So let me elaborate.

I love watching/listening/reading all about love. I love the falling in love, the love between family, old love, new love, healthy love, toxic love, short-term love, long-term love…ALL OF IT. My heart swells and breaks on the successes and failures of love. It is what makes being awake worthwhile. Love is deathless, endless, timeless, circular, perpetual, and it is why we’re here.

If you subscribe to the Judeo-Christian mythos, God created humans to experience love. That’s literally why we were given this earth: to love one another. God, being an eternal, immortal deity with, theoretically, no other company to keep himself entertained, created humans and made us as blind and limited as we are so as to experience learning to love from as many different facets as possible. We each have our own unique take on love. We all mostly have the same ideas, in the grander sense, about what love should look like. But what God seems to have wanted from us is to know the tiniest ways that love can exist. It’s a glance. It’s a hug. It’s a hand. It’s doing the dishes. It’s walking the dog. It’s making popcorn and letting someone else pick the movie. It’s making dinner. It’s painting a picture. It’s writing a note. It’s writing a novel. It’s kissing someone’s cheek. It’s talking things through. It’s choosing to fight. It’s choosing to step back. It’s playing. It’s creating. There are all kinds of ways to love! And God wants to know about it. God, being all-knowing, already knew what love would be to humans before we were created, and, yeah, it’s a total paradox. But that’s kinda how religion works, and I’m talking about love, not religion.

Taking it further back, love isn’t just the sweet stuff. It isn’t even the messy parts. It can be radically violent. Take Aphrodite, and her son Eros/Cupid, the duo for whom this ridiculous made-up “holiday” is all about. The origin story of Aphrodite, interestingly, predates? Possibly aligns with? (Timelines aren’t a thing in Greek mythology.) the arrival of Zeus and his two brothers, Hades and Poseidon. Aphrodite was created by the brothers’ father, Kronos, when he castrated (yeah, you read that right) his own father, Uranus. (If you’d like a way to pronounce this name without sounding like you’re twelve, it’s OO-RAH-NOOS.) Aphrodite sprang from the bloody seafoam created by Uranus’s fallen manly bits. So, Uranus, being the embodiment of the heavens, or literally heaven, was castrated by his son, the titan celebrated for being the provider of agriculture and the harvest, something that in ancient times meant life and death itself. So I guess that sort of makes Aphrodite Kronos’s sister? Half-sister? Aunt of Zeus? It’s weird because Aphrodite is a goddess, not a titan, but she’s not born from any titan or other gods or goddesses. I’m not exactly sure how to categorize a lineage that sprang from bloody man parts falling into the ocean, to be honest. All this to illustrate that what I think the Hellenic, and later the Roman, people were trying to say is that love is often something beautiful that comes out of strife and maybe even bloodshed. There is beauty in the birthing of a child, which is a painful and bloody process, though not so much for the men. But it results from an act of love creating more love through blood and pain. The two things do go hand in hand, and I guess that’s what the myth is really about. In modern times, we’d probably say this kind of love would be pretty toxic, and I’m not really arguing that. But I also find a measure of truth in it. It was an extremely popular trope in the late 80s to early 90s romance novels, falling in love through fighting and arguing practically nonstop. The truth is probably closer to passion being conflated with love, which is an easy thing to do. Love itself is a kind of passion. You cannot have love without passion, but it doesn’t always have to be a sexual kind of passion. I think it’s important to decide exactly how you feel about this, because as I said previously, God wants to experience all kinds of love.

These days, we don’t worship the ancient deities for presiding over our messy love lives, even during Valentine’s Day. We also don’t typically praise our modern God for creating love for us to experience, as Valentine’s Day is basically a day to overpay for cheap chocolates and build ridiculous standards of how we want the people who already love us to express that love. Instead, we worship at the altar of commercialism in order to help us express our love. Even children are expected, even trained, to take this one day and make it into a popularity contest with the purchasing, personalizing and distribution of tiny pieces of paper called “valentines.” If you don’t get one, suddenly your sense of self and your sense of your position in society can shift, sending you into a blinding spiral of self-doubt and even shame. This is beyond ridiculous, obviously. The truth we should all know, and hopefully most do, is that we love each other every day, and having a day to set aside time to specifically say “I love you” is nice. But it shouldn’t be so necessary to our sense of identity that we hang all our self-esteem on being told on one particular day that we’re loved.

I could also argue that our modern worship of love resides in human creation. We, Americans especially, rely these days on realizing the truth about ourselves and the ways we love through the absorption of entertainment. We sieve elements of self-awareness from modern depictions of love through the creation of art, movies, music, TV shows, books, etc. We draw lovers embracing, paint kisses, quote Romeo and Juliet, write scripts, rhyme lyrics, and generally consume our representations of love as though we were standing in a buffet line. I know it sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m really not. I’m definitely an addict of love stories, so for me it’s more of a Brokeback-Mountain-I-wish-I-could-quit-you kind of thing. Except I don’t want to quit. I want more and more and more all the time! Love is awesome! It’s amazing and wonderful all the time, and I quite literally find my favorite love stories and just keep replaying them in my head over and over forever!

What are some of my favorites, you ask? (Even if you didn’t, I’m gonna tell you anyway cuz this is my blog so deal with it.) Honestly, there are WAY TOO MANY to name them all, but the short list is as follows: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the movies Titanic, Love Actually, 10 Things I Hate About You, Simply Irresistible, the Outlander series (books and TV adaptation), and basically any series written by Nora Roberts.

Oh, Nora Roberts! Considering this woman’s prodigious output of novels (most of which, I’ll grant you, are formulaic AF) in both the romance and murder mystery genres, I really can’t say enough about her multitudinous number of series. I do like some of her standalone novels, but not as much. The series are where it’s at. You get three, sometimes even four or five books to fall in love with the characters, the challenges they face, getting to watch them change as they rise to face and eventually overcome their challenges, getting to watch them fall in love with each other. *Wistful sigh* It really is like allowing your overtaxed soul to binge and soothe itself on sweet, sweet romance and love. She doesn’t only write romantic love, though that is the overarching element to all her books because she’s, duh, a romance writer! But she really seems to capture the whole human experience in her characters. She seems to understand, in a way that makes me think she’s actually Aphrodite incarnate, the foibles, the failures, the darkness, the light, the life, the joys and sadness, the, well, everything of being human. She makes her characters into the kind of people I want to know, sometimes even want to be. She doesn’t just hit the same stereotypes over and over, and she doesn’t only write from one perspective. She writes with male characters as the focus of the journey, female characters as the heroines; she makes mothers into villains, brothers into heroes, cousins into friends, and even makes some of her characters into supernatural creatures. She doesn’t limit herself! Diving into one of her books is like escaping into a warm, scented bath where the water never gets cold and your wine glass never runs out. I literally own so many of her books that I accidentally bought different printings of books I already owned! And I’m not going to stop!

I also have great appreciation for comic artists. My special favorites right now are Nathan Pyle’s Strange Planet, Catana Comics (which is basically this couple who are living parallel lives with my husband and me), Yehuda and Maya Devir’s One of Those Days, and Lore Olympus, by Rachel Smythe. (LORE OLYMPUS!!!)

Ugh, Lore Olympus is the thing that is currently making my heart go pitter patter because, as they have been for so long now, Hades and Persephone are my OTP. For those of you readers who are not total geeks like me, OTP is nerdspeak for “One True Pairing.” It’s the ship you ship more than any other ship in the sea. Ships, by the way, are relationSHIPS you favor, and it can be both a verb and a noun. But Hades and Persephone are my OTP, and I’m so in love with what Rachel Smythe is doing with their story, I have literally binged the entire comic three times in the last two weeks because I simply couldn’t stop thinking about it and move on to another story. It feeds my need for angsty, awkward, stuttering, sweet, and oh-so-achingly-precious love! To paraphrase Eros in the comic, they are cinnamon rolls, and my heart is living for their story. The Greek myth surrounding Hades and Persephone isn’t as romantic, and it really glosses over most of the meat of the story, but I will say that Rachel Smythe is staying *mostly* true to the myth’s guidelines as she delves deeper into the characters and their individual psychology. She makes you understand the myth in a modern setting, with modern language and ways of relating to one another. It’s an understatement to say that our manners have changed since the Bronze Age, but humans and our pathos have not changed much at all. The fact that she’s able to take a completely obsolete mythology and breathe such fresh energy into it is nothing short of brilliant. But it does prove my point, that love itself is why we’re here. The gods knew it. The ancients knew it. And, on some level, I think most of us know it now.

I really enjoy reading romance novels from different writers, but Nora Roberts is definitely my favorite. But I have specific tropes that just do it for me every time I read them, and it doesn’t really matter to me which author it is as long as they do it well. There’s the he’s-rich-and-aloof-and-she-doesn’t-care-about-his-money-and-won’t-put-up-with-his-crap one. There’s the he’s-got-a-huge-secret-and-thinks-he’s-not-good-enough-for-her-but-he-really-is trope. There’s the she’s-got-a-secret-and-he’s-trying-to-save-her-but-she-saves-herself one that I feel like is a fun, feminist twist on the old white knight tale. There’s the one-of-them-is-in-danger-and-the-other-gets-drawn-in-to-the-chase-and-they-fall-in-love-while-on-the-run-before-everything-resolves one. And my ultimate favorite, the one where they’re both too proud to clear up a simple misunderstanding and have a huge falling out over it, making you think it’s over for them, but then they each find out they were wrong about the other one through separate channels and wind up getting together at the very end after all. *sigh* Oh, my beloved, predictable love stories. Who would I be without them?

Lastly, I want to acknowledge LGBTQ+ love! There are, in my opinion, not enough mainstream LGBTQ+ love stories out there, but I want my LGBTQ+ readers to know they exist. And if you have some favorites, please comment or email or Facebook me to tell me about them! I don’t discriminate when it comes to love, and I whole-heartedly believe that God doesn’t hate us for loving His/Her/Its/Their creations, our fellow humans, body parts notwithstanding. Going back to the Judeo-Christian God I mentioned earlier having created us in order to experience love, wouldn’t it be an awfully short-sighted and limited God (the complete antithesis of how Christians believe God to be) who only wanted to know about male-female romantic love? I certainly think so. I think if God created us humans to experience love through us, He/She/It/They would want to experience as many different versions of all types of love that it would be possible to create and know, and that is why there are so many billions and billions of us throughout history and in modern times with our own individual lives that all add up to one amazing story. And frankly, there is so much hate and violence and darkness in the world, I’ll happily take whatever kind of love there is as a bright counterbalance.

So here’s my super-cliched closing: don’t just wait for Valentine’s Day to say “I love you.” Say it every time you feel it. I promise you, there are so many people walking around lonely thinking that they don’t have anyone to love them, it won’t be a burden to say you love someone. And if you don’t have someone in your life you can say those words to, get a dog or a cat! Animals can definitely love humans, and they do so unconditionally. Your cat may make you work a little harder for their affection, but they do still love you. And a dog won’t make you work for it at all. Dogs are literally just fluffballs of love on four legs. So celebrate love! Celebrate your ability to love! Let yourself experience love in whatever form you find it! Love is all around us! And lastly, I love all of you!