From winning slam poetry and storytelling slams to performing solo shows, from blogs to memoir, from screenplays to web series, Skylar Lyralen Kaye leans hard into the funny. They claim they can make anything comic, including the most tragic experiences from their own life.
QUEERLY ENLIGHTENED
Now on Substack
By Lyralen Kaye
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
What is love, anyhow?
My partner, for many, many, many, many, many, many, too many, years claimed that love was a feeling. They felt all warm about me, found me to be precious, admirable, irritating…oh, wait, I’m supposed to be positive. They felt a draw to my being, a desire to get closer, to learn, to know me…they felt, felt, felt.
This whole time, I’m like, no. No, no, no. I’m not even sure I believe in feelings. But I know I don’t believe that love is a feeling. And besides, you don’t think about your feelings enough, and that means you get mad at me too much….
And on, into my crazy.
However, when I became somewhat coherent, I told them that love was like yoga. (I do yoga, a lot.) Love is a practice, I said. It comes to life only in how we behave, in what we do, what we practice toward the other person. Love, for me, led to attempts to be better, to be honest, trying to be kind, to hold my ground, to make decisions that took them into consideration, even when the decisions broke my heart or scared me down to my bones. Love, for me, bonds in the actions of a shared life.
Now, my partner loves their feelings. They believe them. I, on the other hand, don’t trust emotions worth shit. I believe in listening to them, and then making decisions separately from how I feel. My partner lives from their very big heart; they come into their life from their tenderness. I live from my incredibly vocal gut. (No, I’m not talking about the scatological and all my digestive problems! I’m saying my intuition speaks loud and clear, a lot, even when I’d rather ignore it.) I come into life sensing from what I know.
But I’m the one writing this book, and so guess what? For our purposes, love is a practice. All joking aside, the practice of acknowledging your crazy, telling on your crazy to your partner, and continually putting out the welcome mat for what irritates you, triggers you, and drives you out of your mind in another person, is one of courage, insight and wisdom. Not to mention intimacy, a word to which I have a rather profound allergic reaction.
Love is a practice of kindness, motivated by a feeling of deep caring that makes us want to get closer.
That ought to make my partner happy.
I will have more to say about this as we go on…and a lot to say about what love is not, and what relationships are not.
But for now, if love is a practice, then marriage is a binding agreement to share our lives within that practice.
We will get triggered. We will fall out of kindness and into blame. We will make every possible mistake. Sometimes it won’t be all that funny. But as long as we know we’re crazy, we have a path back to kindness. Like, hey, sweetheart, I’m just doing the best I can in my own crazy way. And by the way, did I mention how today I decided you don’t love me any more because you ate all the dark chocolate in the house on the day I got my PERIOD.
Seriously. We are ridiculous beings. Capable of kindness, of open hearts, of courage, all the while telling ourselves insane untruths, and, hopefully, knowing it.
