I've looked at love from both sides now

The MUCH-ANTICIPATED update on my usual Valentine's Day playlists

Howdy, and welcome to Good And Good For You, a newsletter about music and feelings. I try to write a few times a month with stories about the music that matters most to me, and when I have time, I occasionally do new music roundups and reviews. In the meantime, I’m working on a book about growing up alongside Paramore. Subscribe if u love me!

The past oh, I don’t know, five or six years, I’ve updated and shared two playlists for Valentine’s Day. One for the lovers, and one for the… non-lovers.

If you know me well, you might be able to guess where this is going.

I made the Love playlist, “If devotion is a river,” from a first-person perspective. I have always loved love, and for the past 10 years, I loved being in love. Or, at the very least, the idea of being in love. What has my life been, if not an endeavor in romance? It’s in my bones.

“If devotion is a river” comes from the depths of my soul, and it plays to every single one of my strengths. I can make a hell of a playlist. I made a hell of a wife. “If devotion is a river” was, and is, a concise ode to what I simultaneously had, and wished I had, most of the time all wrapped up into one. Life is a rom-com, the playlist argues. And, startlingly, I still cannot bring myself to fully disagree.

In my decade of partnership, I always gave my very best effort to sympathize with the singles in my life. The other playlist, the one for the non-lovers, sums up those attempts quite nicely: I wanted to present a benevolent Valentine’s offering, something for everyone; perhaps, at its core, an attempt to assuage what I always assumed was bitterness and jealousy aimed at the Lovers’ World from the Single World.

It was……….a nice effort.

But I’m looking at the playlist now and it is NOT GOOD.

It’s true, I always knew it wasn’t a cohesive playlist like its counterpart. No matter how hard I tried, how many times I tried to imagine what I’d want on a Valentine’s playlist if I was single, I could hear it in the song progression, feel it in the mood: something was off.

I know, I know: we can never truly know how it feels to stand in another person’s shoes until we’re in them. I know I don’t need to apologize for not knowing what it was like out here. And yet, the magnitude of my not-having-known feels immense. I’m 32 and just now single and I don’t know where to even begin mapping that out.

Last week, at the Grammys, Joni Mitchell performed her song “Both Sides Now.” (I haven’t watched it yet. I don’t think I can.) It’s one of my all-time favorite songs, one of the first songs that made me feel the true heft of my heartbreak this last summer. It’s also, incidentally, a defining song of one of my favorite rom-coms, Love Actually.

“To continue your emotional education,” reads the note from Alan Rickman’s character to Emma Thompson’s character as she opens her Christmas gift, a Joni Mitchell CD. If you’ve seen the movie, you know the implications. She excuses herself to the other room and cries and her heart breaks wide open and “Both Sides Now” is playing, and then she brushes her tears away and goes back in the other room and finishes what needs to be done as if nothing ever happened. But we know, she knows, she’s journeyed across a line that can’t be uncrossed. “And if you care, don’t let them know,” implores Joni in the song’s second verse, as Emma’s character weeps. “Don’t give yourself away.” But we lovers know: regardless of how any story of ours ends, that’s a foregone conclusion.

This year, for the first Valentine’s Day in 11 years, I will have looked at love from both sides now. My emotional education has taken me in a direction I never imagined, and I find myself struggling to stop the bleeding of pure, unfiltered despair. Simultaneously, though, I find myself hopeful—if only in the very briefest of moments—that romance can still be found in a million other places and people. I find myself full of a rage so deep and dire it threatens to eat me alive. I find myself giddy with the possibility of a new crush. I find myself unbelievably cynical at what the world of dating seems to offer. There’s so much on this side that I’m only just beginning to experience, let alone understand. I’m finding that, like Joni says, I really don’t know love at all.

So, this Valentine’s Day, I don’t have a foil to offer in conjunction with my lovers’ playlist. The lovers’ playlist remains; it’s one of the best I’ve ever made. I can only hope to, one of these Valentine’s Days, make one just as good from the other side.