At the stroke of midnight, none of us crowded around the TV. Instead, the shouts counting down the final seconds before the New Year floated from across the room as all of my friends, and the friends of my friends’ siblings, scrambled to duck their heads under the pool table. With a cup of twelve grapes in one hand and Welch’s sparkling grape juice in the other, I joined them, all of us smirking at the absurdity of squeezing all twelve of us in the tight space, barely illuminated by a phone flashlight. When the clock finally struck twelve, all raced to avoid misfortune, eating one grape for every month of good luck, before downing our choice of beverage, champagne or sparkling grape juice for us muslims and the non-drinkers amongst us.
An hour later, we gathered around the kitchen table upstairs, our number dwindling as the younger siblings scurried off to bed and their friends returned home, cherishing our drinks and picking at dessert and snacks. Each of us picked a sheet of colored paper and a handful of markers and began neatly dividing it into rows and columns. Unlike devouring grapes, this year was the first year we decided to make a New Year’s Resolution Bingo card, featuring twenty-four goals we hoped to accomplish this year. As I pondered what I hoped to achieve in the next year, I listed some common milestones, like consistently going to the gym, making the Dean’s List again, or actually becoming fluent in Spanish and finally starting to learn Arabic. However, as we joked about my friend wearing red underwear, supposedly said to bring good luck to your love life if you wore them while finishing all twelve grapes, my mind drifted towards another goal. I picked up the nearest red marker, drew a circle, and crossed a line through the center, covering relationship/situationship.
I imagine that a few of you are quite confused, having clicked on an article about love, only to scroll down to hear about my refusal of non-platonic relationships. As of nine months later, at the time of writing, that has not changed. In fact, I’ve been overjoyed with my success. Without taking a step back, it is difficult to glimpse the whole perspective, after all. For someone who used to rely on romantic partners like a crutch, avoiding dating opened a new door and helped me to reconcile my actions with my values. As Muslims, we are taught to avoid relationships without the intention of marriage, avoiding the frivolity of Western dating and zina, a calling that resonated deeply within me over the last year. Instead, I have fulfilled myself by investing in new hobbies, rekindling my love for reading and expanding my knowledge while renewing my appreciation for the platonic relationships in my life. Hearing Olivia Dean dedicate “I’ve Seen It”, the closing song of The Art of Loving, to those same platonic relationships reaffirmed for me that love is gathering together to swallow twelve grapes under a table or waking up before sunrise to gather your friends, picking up the last from an airport hundreds of miles away, all while singing Olivia Dean’s discography the whole way to the concert.
In the second line of the opening track “The Art of Loving (Intro)”, she sings “It wasn’t all for nothing/yeah you taught me something.” Throughout the entire album, love is valued in the image of feminist author bell hooks, as a reality, a practice, and a skill improved through careful cultivation, rather than the mystical force often portrayed in fairy tales (see All About Love by bell hooks). It requires nourishment, a reminder given in “Nice to Each Other” by the line, “water, sunlight, talking all night”. In this definition, love is also the highest form of care, as in her declaration that “love’s never wasted when it’s shared”. I carry a part of my past relationships before I reverted with me, which forged my ideal of love. It is for precisely this reason that I do not regret the past, since without the events of my past, I could not have defined the person I am today. As Olivia Dean phrases it: “All the things, I couldn’t live without/ I don’t need them now” (“Lady Lady”).
Framing love as a practice rather than a feeling creates an entirely new understanding of interpersonal dynamics, rooted in the interdependence of humans. Informed by this framework, the line “rise to each other” is elevated to encapsulate how our bonds encourage us to fulfill our potential through mutual responsibilities (“Nice to Each Other”). These bonds are not only limited to interactions between humans, but also between humans and nature, based on the mutual needs of “water, sunlight, and talking all night”, perhaps best illustrated as a metaphor for attention or care, and reciprocal relationships described by Indigenous wisdom (see Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer). At the same time, Olivia acknowledges “love needs breathing” (“Something Inbetween”), a quality that separates it from obsession and lust, providing the space for intention and consideration of compatibility. My first relationship dominated my time, preventing me from developing my own hobbies and interests independent from those of my girlfriend. When we entered college, the busy days of classes often pushed our conversations into the evening, literally talking all night. Only afterwards did I realize spending every moment between classes, day and night, glued to my phone prevented me from living a fulfilling life on campus. In my sophomore year, I focused harder on my classes, joined clubs, and started organizing for changes I wanted to see. Even then, I fell into the dopamine traps of instant connection, ruining my sleep over the inescapable rush caused by a throbbing heart after meeting someone new.
Despite filling my schedule with worldly activities, that aching feeling in my heart told me something was missing from my consciousness of love. Overwhelmed by the warm feelings of acceptance and support I found missing for most of my life, I dived into love, only to find myself lost. For me, Olivia Dean’s chorus of “I’m not his,I’m not hers/ I’m not your all or nothing/ I’m more, can we still be something in between?” reflected my inability to establish my own identity (also see “Somebody to You” by Joy Crookes). All relationships need boundaries and I needed space for self-introspection and improvement. When I stopped clinging to the idea of that relationship, weeks after it ended, I found “it’s not the end, it’s the making of” (“Baby Steps”) and “there’s some good in goodbyes” (“A Couple Minutes”).“Baby Steps” also exemplifies loving yourself and filling the world around you with that love, like in one of my favorite verses: “There’ll be roses on the shelf/ ‘cause this house gon’ love itself.” I would never be able to maintain my disciplined routine of waking up for fajr every morning and going to the gym if I still delayed my bedtime for hours texting. By tuning out the world and praying five times a day, I’m grounded in gratitude for what I have and do not have. By following dietary restrictions, I am conscious of the ingredients that I derive my nutrition from and their connection to the animals and plants that provided their lives for my benefit. Treating the body and soul with love enables me, physically and spiritually, to extend gestures of that love to my friends too. After experiencing my second breakup, I decided to transform my plan of making a bouquet for my girlfriend into four smaller “galentines” bouquets for my female friends. Knowing I uplifted the spirits of my friends, including one who never received flowers from her own ex-boyfriend before, powered me through the sight of enamored couples that day, even though it seems silly now.
Loving oneself is also the basis of self-confidence, the lack of which I believe influenced my exaltation of love, giving it a religious-like power over my feelings and actions. I felt heard when I listened to the line “I can’t tell if you need me or want me all that much” for the first time, because I remember lying in bed thinking the same thing. I’ve learned that no love should provoke those feelings, but also that it often reflects underlying, unaddressed issues of self-confidence. At that time, I subscribed to the theory of two people representing two halves, only a complete whole once they found each other. Now, I believe it aligns more with “So Easy (To Fall In Love)”: “There’s Heaven in my heart, and we could find you some space”. Instead of searching for validation through romance, that validation comes from belief in Allah (SWT), which I hope is one day enhanced by finding a lifelong partner who echoes that faith, but that I understand is not required to be fully human. When I was sixteen, lifelong also seemed like an impossibility, and in the narrow perspective that I imagined love, it would be. I think Olivia Dean captures a similar sentiment when she sings, “I’m too young to believe until the end, too scared to cut it short?” By returning to bell hooks, to view love as a reality, I find the challenges comprised in a lifetime much easier to navigate, because to live is to struggle imperfectly together, the meaning of which is incomprehensible to mere humans. As Olivia Dean reminds us in “I’ve Seen It”, love is around us all the time, in the places and people we cherish, and inside all of us, since we’ve all been blessed with the ability to love.
