Love Song, Part 1: A Sunday Kind Of Love

In this three-part series titled Love Song, actor, writer and producer Victoria Loke deep dives into the idea of love through a series of literary essays. This series inspired by classic love songs takes the reader on an explorative journey through the three ways in which we tend to experience love: romantic love, platonic love, and self-love. Each essay combines her personal experiences with universal lessons about the nature of love and seeks to inspire you with ways you might bring more love into your own lives, whether in your relationships with others or with yourself. By inviting you to fall back in love with yourself, each essay can be described as a love song to the self.

Part one explores the idea of romantic love through the song A Sunday Kind Of Love by Etta James.

Why we love  

I love because I can love.  

This does not seem like something that merits being put into words because it sounds so obvious, almost redundant, and yet when I’ve spoken to others who’ve never quite considered the why behind their own reasons for loving before, this is hardly ever the first thing that comes to mind.  

People love for a variety of reasons, the most common being loving someone so that we might be loved in return. This is the romantic’s holy grail, and the immense body of literature and stories birthed from this concept alone is only a drop in the bucket of humanity’s thirst for the reciprocity of love. In this situation,  however, the act of loving is ultimately reduced to a matter of tallying up a balance sheet, the lover a vigilant accountant who scrutinizes the numbers with hawk-eyed precision to see if the amount of love reciprocated is indeed equivalent to the sum of initial love invested. Any less and it’s a slight, any more and then it’s too much.  

Some others might choose not to love at all: perhaps past experiences with so-called love gone sour has left their palate scorched, acerbic, or perhaps the enormity of love in all its grandeur and omnipotence seems too great a gift to accept – how could I ever, in all my unworthiness, muster up something suitable to give in return – and so it is only polite that one rejects such a gift entirely. 

For something that is supposed to come so naturally to us, something that we all yearn for regardless of whether or not we’d like to admit it, loving has somehow become a complex acrobatic feat with millions of videos and memes and armchair experts trying to dissect the physics behind this elaborate juggling act. 

I have tried to coax my love into performing by this playbook, having been under the false impression that perhaps I just had some growing up to do, and that my ineptitude at playing by these rules was caused merely by a lack of practice.  

And so I have been the girl who has stood alone sobbing in a dark alleyway on a Saturday night over a boy who sees my feelings and my intelligence as nothing more than design flaws on an otherwise perfectly sculpted android. I have spent many tortured nights flipping through the ledger of love, trying to figure out what exactly went wrong here, did I not love enough, did I not love the right way, why did this end? Only to realize that this ledger was never my own, this was never my way of understanding love, and so when the boy I’d loved was no longer in my ear demanding to see the accounts, I threw it out the window.  

Love to me has always been an overflowing cup of child-like wonder and sense of adventure, exemplified in the way a child can fall madly in love with a little pebble she picks up on the side of the street, give it a name, sleep with it on her pillow. My pet rock (I’d named her Roxanne) and I had some wonderful times together until I lost her in a tragic vacuuming incident, but if anything, this fleeting friendship is the perfect example of the joy of loving for love’s sake. There are not many things less capable of reciprocating affection than a rock, although there certainly are people with the personality of a rock, and yet loving Roxanne was a fun, happy memory.  

I have been asked if I have ever had any regrets about my past relationships, and have I ever felt like I’ve wasted my time, and the answer has always been no. And that is because I love, simply because I can love.  

My love is not transactional. I don’t put love into a relationship like it’s a vending machine, and expect a perfect partner to fall out.  

It is the end of 2020, we are now able to receive guests in our houses again,  although on all accounts it seems that some form of distancing was exactly what my boyfriend and I had needed. With this distance, I am finally able to regard the justice of his feelings for me, as Frank O’Hara once wrote, and my own love for him. A part of me wants to continue clinging onto my achingly large blindspot for all his red flags, and the other part wants to pry my eyelids open to the truth. I  haven’t decided which part I want to listen to.

He sits cross-legged before me as he sweats a puddle into my floor, having stopped by my apartment on his cycling route. An unceremonious reunion for an equally perfunctory affair: our relationship is reaching its final breaking point,  having endured enough on-again-off-again cycles to tire out even the most resilient sinews of two hopeful hearts.  

We talk about whether this relationship is working for either of us, and the conversation arrives at our first break-up. I’d selected a discreet and emotionally detached location for us to meet, a small restaurant tucked away in the corner of a nondescript alley neither of us had ever been to, where neither of us would have to face the awkward possibility of running into anyone we knew. That night, our better selves did justice to our love for each other, understood how the strain of our current circumstances would be unfair on either of us and agreed it was best that we go our separate ways. He’d told me I deserved better than he could ever give me. I’d said that while I could only ever see the good in him, a part of me knew that to be true. We’d held each other in what felt like the longest embrace, long enough for some drunk passers-by to start heckling us for it, and then we’d kissed each other goodbye. Suppose we’d listened to the wisdom that graced us that night,  perhaps we wouldn’t have had to take this 4-year detour that has now led us back to the exact same fork in the road. More and more it’s beginning to seem like we’d gotten the answer right that first time around, then went back and scribbled all over it again and again in clumsy permanent marker.  

It was a loving and sincere break-up done right – the highest expression of love often lies in its goodbye – and it was a moment I’d tucked away preciously in a little imaginary locket, like a heart-shaped photograph to look at fondly from the bloodstained trenches of war. Desperate for something to remind me of the love that precipitated the bloodshed, I had taken this locket out too many times to count in the losing battle that is our relationship, the locket’s shiny silver clasp now worn a rough lacklustre grey.  

He is now rambling on about nothing in particular, expressing vague annoyances at how I liked expensive things, and how he’d never seen me eat at a casual establishment. I don’t quite understand what he’s getting at until he points out that the restaurant I’d selected on the night we first broke up, turned out to be actually quite expensive as well.  

I feel the hair on the back of my neck stand as if I were watching a hand reach for a big red nuclear button in slow motion.  

My father, having himself experienced being married to a volatile mess of a person, had long ago taught me that it is sometimes within our control and within the generous grasp of love to prevent our partners from digging themselves into a hole too deep for them to come out of. But with that, he had also taught me that there are some things which, once they are said, can no longer be taken back.  

I watch the hand make contact with the red button, knowing it is too late for me to lunge across the room to stop it.  

“Were you just using me to eat at a fancy restaurant?”  

Disgust erupts like hot lava within the centre of my abdomen.  

He’s levelled all sorts of baseless accusations at me in the past, and in the feverish blindness of my affection for him, I’ve obliged to do myself the indignity of actually responding to the delusional figments of his insecurities. This time is different, however.  

Besides the fact that I, of all people, am quite possibly one of the last people who would ever be found jonesing for someone to buy me a meal, to ask something so petty and miserly was a jarring reflection of the small-mindedness of the person who voiced it. In one clean sweep, the tall mirage of the man I had hoped he would be was blown away to reveal a sort of spineless little worm, wriggling and pathetic.  

I had treasured that first break-up as a heartfelt token of our love for each other, worn it on my chest like a jewel, but as it turns out, all he took away from that night were numbers on a receipt.  

Through tears, I ask him why he feels the need to destroy everything, an overgrown playground bully kicking down everyone’s sandcastles with glee, and why in his barbaric impulses he couldn’t even find the mercy to spare me this memory.  

It takes him a bit of time before he realizes what he has done, and he tries to take it back, and rebuild the effigy of his manhood. He fumbles frantically through his thoughts, perhaps there is something he can say now to cancel everything he’s said,  an override code hidden somewhere in the programming, but we watch mournfully as the missiles fire off in the distance.  

The locket breaks apart in my hand.  

Love, unconditionally  

It needs to be said that my attraction to this particular brand of brute is not  to be lauded as an act of supernormal charity, but rather read as a cautionary tale  about the insidious ways in which we often sabotage ourselves as penance to the  critical voice in our head that is equal parts self-loathing and self-destruction.  

The overwhelming majority of people did not grow up with unconditional  love. Affection was extended only as a reward for good behavior, good grades, good  looks, “good” here being misused as if it were some universal standard when in  reality it is a standard entirely set by each individual parent, based on their own  projections. In other words, love was often only given in exchange for compliance.  Failure to comply was then met with punishment, and that punishing voice still  holds the whip in our minds and hearts today.  

Many of us, therefore, grow up with this wound of simultaneously feeling  like we are not deserving of love, yet also expecting those we love to behave a  certain way in order to warrant the love we might give to them.  

We are conditioned to believe that love is something we must earn, that love  must always entail sacrifice for it to be true, that love is available only in scarce  supply and therefore cannot be squandered. We are made to believe that jealousy  and drama and selfishness and disappointment are symptoms of love, when in  reality they are symptoms of a wound.  

As for me, I am fortunate enough to have a grandmother who shows me  unconditional love, and friends who have become my chosen family and frequently  show me the same. It is their unwavering love for me and unwavering disdain for  this ex-boyfriend of mine that first showed me why I was still experiencing  heartbreak in love. It wasn’t because I didn’t know how to love according to the  rules of the playbook as I’d once thought, but because the unloving, punishing  voice in my head, was still undermining my every effort.  

The line between being loving and being a pushover is a nebulous one,  particularly for women who’ve grown up in a world that has convinced us the  pinnacle of womanly virtue is self-sacrifice. (It is not.)  

But there was nothing inherently wrong with the way I loved with abandon:  loving generously and abundantly has always come naturally to me, as it should.  What I had failed to realize was only that while I’d been happily scattering the  petals of my love for everyone who crosses my path, I’d neglected to save a flower  for myself. Through the fierce love that was shown to me, I was finally able to  understand how in order for me to truly understand and experience love, I had to  first love myself.

Once that happened, all the puzzle pieces clicked into place.  

A long thirst quenched  

A few months after the break-up, my now ex-boyfriend and I found ourselves seated on a park bench by the beach. He’d said he had something he wanted to say  to me, and so I’d acquiesced to meeting him. I’d suggested a cafe at first and was mildly annoyed when he refused, but I wasn’t about to have my day ruined by someone I no longer had anything to do with so here we are on a park bench facing the ocean, sitting apart on a mossy wooden bench with all the intimacy of two strangers.  

Finally, I direct my gaze at him, and he deflects its intensity onto the soft, palliative waves of water before us. He asked me whether I’d mind if he recited from a letter because he’d written everything down so he wouldn’t leave anything out. I  tell him to go ahead, I’m listening.  

He thanks me profoundly for the love I gave him.  

He says he’s never met anyone who was capable of loving as much as I was,  and so he had no idea what to do with himself. He apologizes for making a mess of everything by bringing his past traumas into something so pure. He says he wanted to tell me in person that having been loved by me changed his life forever, and that he had started therapy to begin working through his past because he wants to become a better person. This is not a Hail Mary attempt to “win me back”, just a pure expression of deep gratitude as we part ways forever.  

I sit in the sort of silence that accompanies the end of a book, that tranquil sliver of time in which you stare at the words on its back cover, not searching for any more meaning but just taking in the magnitude of the story that has just been told.  

I sent him away with more love and a big hug that day.  

It was on this day that I caught a glimpse of the transformative power of love, not just in him but also in myself. People who have only known how to use and be used by other people for affection will falsely believe that the attachment they’re experiencing is love until they face the power of real unconditional love and they are completely floored by it. I saw the seed of change finally bloom in him from the love I’d showered him with, and part of that magic lay in me loving 

myself enough too, loving myself unconditionally as well, to know that I must let him go. I learned that the only love I was still in search of, was the love I had not yet given myself.  

I hope that he is making good on his promise to himself and being a much better boyfriend to his next girlfriend than he ever was to me because I do not participate in the whole “I did all the hard work and then the next girlfriend gets to enjoy the fruits of my labour” narrative either. My ability to love as deeply as I do is  itself one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received – to know that someone was  changed by my love for the better, is just icing on top of an already delicious cake,  one that I am happy to share with anyone who is hungry for a bite.  

I am not writing this to say that I am somehow special or more emotionally evolved than anyone but to say that this sort of love is possible. Everyone can access this love that is generous, forgiving, free-flowing, and when all is said and done, protective, not only of others but of ourselves. This love is the birthright of every person born onto this earth, and it is only the layers of past emotional trauma and social conditioning that have led some of us to become estranged from the infinite love that not only surrounds us, but is within us as well.  

It is entirely within our power to each reclaim our individual sense of childlike awe and excitement to love. It is entirely within our capacity to love with relentless passion, to love without holding back, and to receive love from everything  and everyone around us, ourselves and our pet rocks included. It is only a matter of  whether or not we choose to open our hearts to this overflowing fountain, and when we are thirsty, to know that we are always free to fill a glass for ourselves too.  

Dedicated to Roxanne, who is possibly still sitting at the bottom of a ventilation duct somewhere.  Thank you for letting me love you.

Victoria Loke is an actress, writer, and producer, as well as founder & CEO of Venus Vibes, a creative agency empowering women’s voices and consulting women-focused businesses. She divides her time between Singapore and Seoul, and she is currently working on her debut novel.