NONFICTION: Love Doctor

disclaimer: this was written on July 2011. Five months after, I met a man who changed my perception about love and made it hard for me to even think about exes. 

I remember, finally visiting Dumaguete, after 5 years of being apart with my hometown, riding on a bus to Liloan barge, trying to keep my bags on sight, one on my lap while the other on my foot. On the radio, LoveRadio broadcasted, where a DJ read a letter from a sender, telling the world about her sad love story.

The DJ was expected to give some love advice after he finished reading the story about this widow who lost her husband in a car crash, ending up falling for her husband’s brother, later on. In between lines, a tune from a classical music played while the DJ stressed every word from the script. How trivial for bus riders,  I felt as I was convinced that the DJ was just making the story up. Despite that, without hypocritical lines just to emulate those cynical love-snob women, that story made me recall about my only ‘puppy’ love.

You know that moment when you are about to turn as a single twenty year old, you feel as if you are old enough to land a decent long lasting relationship just like everyone else, but you just can’t get over someone from the past? When you turn twenty-five, you realize how immature you were, five years ago, to not even do something about your love life and stayed single, instead. So you send a letter to you first ex-boyfriend thinking that he still has the same feelings for you, hoping that he would forgive your mistakes. I did that, after overcoming a strong resistance to hold back.

Some people live by repressed feelings. They would rather talk about the man or woman who got away, reshaping the events into something that would favor their egos. “He did not run for me because I was too good for him”, so they would say. Or they would rather conceal their emotions just to secure their reputation. Some people would rather get humiliated via industrial categories than make gender declarations because they think that the latter is more controversially difficult to accept.

I know of someone who ended up gate crashing her boss’ family life, successfully rubbing his self-esteem and unknowingly pulling him into her arms just to satisfy her frustrations with love. She was a closet lesbian who was too afraid to reciprocate her best friend’s confessions. Instead of going out there to share her sexuality to the world, she would rather hide in a dominant man’s shoulders and steal him from his family in proving that she was straight. I know that woman was afraid to take a risk and be rejected by society for she was still living in the comforts of her mother’s house even during her late forties.

Completely opposite from that friend is a woman I knew back in Davao City, who made her husband think that she was dead, after she left him. She was a housemaid in my apartment. One day, she asked me to send a letter to a local radio station.  In it, she wrote a story about her husband. She wanted to finally announce to him why she had not contacted for almost twenty years and why she made it appear that she was dead.

In Tagum, she fell in love with a bus collector who promised him a better life in Davao, away from the mountains. She left her husband for that man and married him, but soon realized that he was abusive. Regardless, she could not make herself leave him because they already had two children before his true colors revealed. She suffered the load of a drunkard husband, two children, and a memory of the more comfortable past, she used to think was the worst. I never had the chance to get the finished letter from her because she got fired for ruining an expensive blouse, soon after

More often, reality is more creative than works of fiction. Some stories have positive endings, of course. While many of my journalist idols and development worker friends end up as spinsters, there are a few of them who happen to have dependable love lives. One remained in a relationship for almost twenty-three years, with two more years waiting before Silver, if they ever were married. Those two wanted to stay boyfriends and girlfriends because they did not feel the need to tie their bond with any legal papers. Some love is robust like that. Others would not believe that it is even possible because “eventually, you still want to walk in that altar, someday”, an agnostic friend once finally confessed after years of denying that she wanted to get settled-down.

Right now, I work as an online content writer about LOVE and talk about these familiar lines on a daily basis. You can call me a modern day Love Doctor and a virtual counterpart of that love guru from the radio. I write about how to mend broken hearts, how to become the best girlfriend or boyfriend and how to get your ex back, every single day. I work under a pen name, of course, while constantly contemplating why I landed in a topic that I do not even know how to personally practice.

But there are theories to rely on. Love theories in the net tell people not to send letters to their ex. Love theories tell people to protect their reputation and to protect the feelings of others. Love theories tell people that marriage is the ultimate key to secure a relationship. Even the Love Radio DJ said the same things when I listened to his advices, a couple of years ago.

More often, I wonder why people need love advises and why this topic even get a lot of internet traffic when I think that love can’t be metered by any theory or judgment at all. Roland Barthes would digress, of course. I came to observe that love is such an interesting topic that film, music and entertainment can’t go about without it. And the topic is literally providing me food on the table.

So while composing a tutorial about ‘getting your ex back’ in one of my commissioned websites, I created the most heartfelt and honest love letter and sent it to my first ex-boyfriend. 

And just to make things beyond fairytale, he replied that he never forgot about me but I was just a little part of his life. “You are not the only girl I never kissed”, he said, while he was the only boy I never kissed, someone who is expectantly hard to put behind. That’s when I understood that while I may have been too stuck up with my own memory of this boy, some things just don’t go around mutually. 

But at least I took the risk to tell him how I felt after all those years. One burden off my shoulders, I genuinely smiled despite the rejection and found myself a cool topic for a love article. Maybe the DJ really did make the story up from his own experience.