By Ruth Chen
Love is like a parking ticket. Your first love leads to more and more love leads to an overwhelming debt you reluctantly pay.
My love feels like it never runs out, but once I have given too much, I have a temporary blockage, a minor traffic jam. I’ve never really given much thought to how my culture impacts the way I love, receive love, and want to be loved. I’ve always enjoyed living in a space of bliss where I believe that it is my personality that counts.
Oh how wrong I am.
Three months into the relationship they tell you they love you for who you are, but you always catch them asking for a little bit more, and more and more. I’ve always had hope that I’d see some slither of emotional maturity in the people I’ve dated – but hope is a slippery snake. Hope can keep us clinging to things that we should let go.
I have given my romantic history some thought and here are my conclusions:
I was influenced sexually at such a young age, and I hate society for conditioning me this way. I had my first kiss at 13, lost my virginity at 15 and the number of sexual partners I have encountered only goes up from here. Shame me, judge me, that’s on you.
I’ve had a long think about this… what got me to this point? Ever since migrating to New Zealand at age 7, all I have thought about is getting with boys, nothing else.
My mum migrated here to do a full-time PHD at Waikato University and Dad was a causal follower. Now that I’m a little older, I realise that Mum was under constant threat and too reached out for whatever safety net she could land on, whether this be at church or baking us chocolate chip cookies on Sundays. I know my parents meant well, but as that 7-year-old, love was at best mouldy and damp, always dangling on a carrot stick that no matter how hard I tried, I could never reach.
All you need is a seed, a TikTok, what that boy said to you in year 7, you are on a roll.
As a child of migrant parents, I never heard, ‘I love you,’ or anything close of the sort. Love was always very pragmatic in terms of surviving in life but living in this constant fight or flight mode only made me more desperate to be loved. When I have kids of my own one day, I always imagine saying, ‘I love you’ as many times as humanly possible. But the truth can be said of the opposite, I live with a duality of wanting better lives for mini-me, but the fear that they would be too much to love. I remember on the day we landed, the cold felt like a punch to the face, and all I wanted to do was snuggle up to my parents in bed. I never go close to that snuggle, but I did familiarise myself with red marks, and a rubber band-like beating because I was being ‘annoying.’
From the emotionally drained parents at home, home away from home, and facing constant racism at primary school, I naturally sought love from all the wrong places. All you need is a seed, a TikTok, what that boy said to you in year 7, you are on a roll.
So now, I am 17 and I ask, “Are you going to marry, kiss or kill me?” as if love is that easy, as if it's that black and white. Do you remember when we would pluck out the flower petals and ponder, “he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me?” I want to paint this metaphor for you because I guess and constantly apologise for being in love or even better yet apologise for wanting to be loved.
