We are so stupid about each other

In defense of "embarrassing" love

Before Sunrise (1995)

In November 2023, my high school friends and I decided to host a Friendsgiving when we were all home from school. It was a makeshift Thanksgiving dinner, a slightly more elevated version of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, serving chicken nuggets and veggie trays instead of buttered toast and jellybeans.

Thanksgiving break of your freshman year feels like a reunion and reckoning all at once. It’s a quiet, unspoken contest of who’s thriving the most and who’s happiest in their new life. It’s a strange limbo: close enough to your senior year that your high school self still softly clings like static, but distant enough that you start to see the seams in your old friendships coming undone—the ones that were once stitched together with hallway laughter and prom dress shopping.

We decided it would be a good idea to bring plus ones (for whatever reason that was). Despite the name of Friendsgiving, three out of six of us decided to bring our boyfriends that everyone in the group had told us to break up with at least once. Now, all six of us are single, and every once in a while, our phones will remind us of the first Friendsgiving. (At the second one, no plus ones were allowed.)

Whenever it happens to resurface, we send our group picture—the time capsule of momentary bliss—in our shared text thread, featuring now-estranged relationships and cheesy smiles. Someone will inevitably say something like “Ew” or “I can’t believe I dated him” like we’re trying to scrub away the sincerity with sarcasm. We use disgust to disguise that we genuinely loved and weren't loved how we wanted in return. There’s nothing “gross” about having tried to love. In contrast, when I see that picture, I always think, I look really happy. And it’s true, I was.

Sometimes, when things end, we feel as though we now need to reframe every good memory through a harsher, more critical lens. We tell ourselves that our joy was just clever acting, as if we were only ever pretending. I always wonder what is so bad about admitting that you were fully, truly happy for a while. Can’t pure elation coexist with the melancholy that was felt at other points too? Can’t they both be folded into the same story? When I look at those pictures, I don’t wince. I am reminded of the version of myself who was capable of looking at someone with so much love.

Maybe I looked smitten because I was, and what’s wrong with that? Why should I erase that softness just to prove I’ve grown?

There’s a paragraph in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You that describes how this part of humanity should be celebrated, not hidden.

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”

The version of myself who would drop everything for love still lives in me. It would be a disservice to her to pretend otherwise, as if she never existed. It would be easier to pretend that we never loved at all, like we were momentarily possessed by some invisible force. “I don’t know what I was doing,” we’ll say, as if love was something that was forcibly thrust upon us—not something we chose. We’re so quick to label ourselves as “delusional” and dismiss our younger selves as “stupid” or “naive,” hoping it will protect us from the tenderness of who we once were. Why do we want to punish the version of ourselves who chose to hope and trust? Who scribbled baby names in the margins of notebooks and dreamt of wedding cakes frosted in vanilla buttercream?

He once told me that I was the funniest person he’d ever met—that no matter what, I always would be. Who’s to say that remained true? What matters is that, in that moment, his words were gospel, seemingly untouchable by time. It was said with absolute truth and conviction, because at that time, he truly believed I was. He couldn’t even fathom the possibility of anyone else amounting to me. Love has a way of doing that—turning someone from merely a synopsis into a full novel.

We become transfixed by someone who was once a stranger, convincing ourselves we know them better than we know our own reflection. It feels as though they were stitched by the same thread, unraveling beside us. It feels fated, like we were born with some invisible string tying us to their orbit. We’d play the fool just to keep them laughing. We memorize the way their face softens once their eyes meet ours, feeling like it’s something sacred. We’d drop everything—cancel plans, shift the world—just to soothe them. We see things that remind us of them everywhere, in everything.

Maybe when you think that you’ve heard their laugh somewhere. Maybe when you still remember how they took their coffee. Maybe in the way their touch still echoes against your skin like a phantom limb. It’s quiet but unrelenting to be forgotten, humming in the mundane.

Sometimes, now, I wonder if those I once loved would love the version of me that exists now. The messily anxious girl I was feels like an unfair tribute to the woman I am today. She was merely an unfinished sketch mistaken for the final draft. It’s strange how a person can love merely a phase of us—a fraction of the person we will become. The person I am now wouldn’t love with the same recklessness, wouldn’t fight with the same sharp edges, or even quite carry herself the same. Despite all of this, whenever they see a glimpse of me somewhere, that is the version of me they’ll always conjure in memory.

Love weaves around all of us, binding even after the needle is gone. While I remember the girl who loved so wildly, she wouldn’t recognize me. When love burns that brightly, it leaves behind an imprint. Why do we believe it so easily vanishes?

Proving you’ve healed from a time when you really, truly loved, with every fiber of your being, is more complex than acting like that version of you was nothing more than a hoax. The love we experienced still lives in us, just in a different way, folded into the lining of who we are. The truest peace is not in forgetting, but in remembering and honoring that memory. There’s something beautiful in admitting that, yes, you still think about it, and no, you don’t feel the need to deflect it or bury it until you’re free from every reminder that it existed.

Let us be so gloriously, irrationally stupid about each other without calling it embarrassing.

It never was and it never will be.

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