Lately I’ve found myself contemplating that eternal question, “What’s love got to do with it?” an inquiry which is second in significance only to “Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” (Answer: No. But thank you for asking). I’m not sure why exactly the first question has been on my mind, but, as usual, I have a theory.

My Theory: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Allow me to translate: entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity when endeavoring to elucidate a given phenomenon. Wait, something here isn’t right. Kindly disregard that. That was actually a tenet of the Reductionist Philosophy of Nominalism, and is more commonly known as Occam’s razor. It’s not my theory at all! If you want to get precise (which is not as much fun as getting jiggy, but leaves you with your self-esteem intact), it’s not even a theory; rather it is a heuristic maxim crucial to understanding scientific theory in general. What’s more, it has nothing whatsoever to do with love, jealousy, or the Pussy Cat Dolls. Sorry about that. Sometimes I confuse myself with a 14th century Logician and Friar.

My Actual Theory: Abundance yields thoughts of impermanence which spawn insecurity.

Abundance: It seems as if suddenly all of my friends are falling in love. What could be wrong with that, you might ask? Nothing. I might reply defensively, there is nothing wrong with that (or anything else for that matter. In fact, everything in the world is perfectly fine. I criticize nothing and judge even less than I criticize, which, if you read the last sentence, means I actually criticize in negative integers. And if you didn’t read the last sentence, that’s fine too. Maybe you didn’t have the energy to read all of it, which is not to imply that you’re lazy. Believe me, no one and nothing is lazy. Sleepy Sunday afternoons? Energetic as hell. Sloths? Totally proactive. The word ‘lazy’ is in fact stricken from my vocabulary. Happy?). So love is grand, and even though it means they have less time to make me dinner and lend me money, I’m glad my friends are falling in it. Better love than quicksand, right?

Take Billi for example.  Billi commonly falls for complex, wounded straight girls who are questioning their identity. She’s a sexual set of training wheels, easing a woman’s transition from straight to gay. For the first time she’s caught herself a woman more complex than wounded, a woman with whom she truly connects, a woman who broke her engagement in part for Billi. For those of you keeping score, that’s one for our team. For those of you who think it is in poor taste to view a straight man’s deeply emotional loss as a lesbian victory, you’ve obviously never known the sweet taste of formerly straight pussy. I haven’t either, but I hear it’s like eating the fish you caught in the morning for dinner that night.

Billi has been talking Zelda up for months, and when I finally met her it was like meeting a unicorn. Not the shy, misty hills sort of unicorn, but the glittery pink variety with rainbows shooting out of her horn and a string you can pull to make her whiny and say, “Math is hard!” A tall stunning blond, Zelda is the sort of woman who cannot help attracting attention. Billi is completely enamored. She equates Zelda with a 1940’s pinup girl, and boomerangs every conversation back to Zelda. This is particularly impressive when she is discussing Kierkegaard.

Then there’s my friend Abby. As long as I’ve known her, Abby has been incredibly critical of her lovers. Until she fell in love with her current girlfriend, she believed she was afraid of intimacy.  The classic Abby story is the one in which she and a woman are having sex and the woman starts talking dirty to her. Abby stops what she is doing, rises up on one elbow and says to the woman, “When we started having sex, I was here.” She raises her hand high in the air. “Then you started talking, and now I’m here.” She lowers her hand several inches.

Abby and I have always bonded over the detached, analytical nature we share. When a girl I was seeing started growling in the middle of fucking me one night, I paused and said, “Are you seriously growling?” And she admitted that yes, she was, and I said, “Do you actually feel like growling or are you just doing it for effect?” And she confirmed the authenticity of her growl, and I sighed and said, “Carry on then,” Abby was the only one with whom I could share my experience. I knew she wouldn’t judge me. “We’re not mean people,” she assured me, “We just have high expectations and so we’re easily disappointed.”

The woman she is with now more than meets Abby’s expectations, sexual and otherwise. “I realized I’m not afraid of intimacy,” she confided recently, “I’m just selective about with whom I choose to achieve it.” Apparently her new girl can position herself such that their clits touch and they both come at the same time. I’ve had girlfriends who couldn’t position themselves such that our lips touched, and the last simultaneous orgasm I had was simultaneous only in the sense that it happened at the same time as…other things, like the neighbor’s dog barking, and someone slamming a car door.

Impermanence: Although I am happy for my friends, I am also the sort of fish that questions the sea in which she swims.

What is this blue stuff? I ask, while the rest of my school flits heedlessly ahead. Of what materiel is it composed and why exactly should I trust it? If it’s here now does that mean it always was? And if it wasn’t, could it disappear again? Wait, what’s that dark, looming shadow?

That’s when I realize my scaled associates were not heedless; in fact, they were headed for the safety of a coral reef. I, on the other fin, caught up in my musings, am now separate and alone. I am trapped out in the open, and that dark shadow is a shark.

To clarify in less aquatic terms: Surrounded by love, I cannot help but question it. For me, love’s presence evokes its absence. When I look at two women deeply in love, maybe holding hands and window shopping on Clark Street or finger-fucking in the alley behind Stargaze, my line of thought goes something like this: Gee, they look happy. They really seem like they’re in love. This can’t be the first time for either of them. I wonder what happened to their last girlfriends. Did they really love them? If they did, why did they stop? If they stopped was what they felt truly love? That’s usually when I pinch my girlfriend, or, if I’m alone, I make a mental note to pinch her later.

Insecurity: This is wrong, I know. It’s my girlfriend’s fault that she stacks everything I own in piles when she’s cleaning and then hides the piles so I can never find anything. It’s her fault that her first reaction to EVERYTHING is laughter, which may sound cheerful, even affirming, but if your classmates made fun of you in the eighth grade, constant indiscriminate guffaws can really start to fuck with you. However, it is not her fault that I minored in Philosophy, nor is it her fault that I feel this gives me license to freely apply misremembered remnants of what may or may not be stage two of the Cosmological Argument to my love life. (If God exists then God must have come into existence, if God came into existence then, at some point, God did not exist, if God did not exist, then is God really God, and if God is not really God, who exactly are musicians thanking at the MTV music awards?) It is not her fault that the center does not hold and that I am obsessed with attrition.

The classic story about my girlfriend is the one in which she squirts lube halfway up inside me and then murmurs, “You’re so wet,” and I just think, Well…yeah, so? I don’t want wetness to be artificially imposed on our sex; I want it to be something I create for her. That sounds like a line from a bad lesbian romance novel, and it’s also incredibly picky. I have no defense. I’m a detail-oriented perfectionist and while that description goes over swimmingly at job interviews, it tends to leave my girlfriends’ mouths agape and gills a flutter, thumping frantically at the bottom of the boat and gasping for oxygen.

Luckily my current girlfriend can see a hook coming before it hits the water and she’s as broadly accepting as I am discriminating. While I’m focused on the cause of my wetness, she’s turned on just because the wetness feels good. (We’re back to vaginal wetness, not fish wetness. Contrary to misogynistic belief, the two have little in common.) When I fixate on what she felt for the women who went before me, she asks me why that matters. When love’s transience makes me distrust its very existence, she goes and smells the couch. Her actions are not allegorical (Before you criticize another, smell that on which you yourself sit), rather, she just washed the cushion covers and she thinks they smell good.

There’s beauty in her easy acceptance of the present, her delight in sensual pleasure. I know I could learn from her. And I will, just as soon as I finalize the Excel spreadsheet into which I have entered all of the pertinent facts about every woman I’ve ever dated. I know that if I can just get the formula right I will be able to determine once and for all whether what we had was love. In the interim friends, please follow my girlfriend’s wise example: As you wander through the Andersonville duplex of life, make time to stop and smell the couch cushions. You won’t regret it. Unless the last person who sat on them had a UTI. Then you might.    

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Sarah Terez Rosenblum spent the last four years of her life in Los Angeles and plans to return even though she hated it.  She will be thirty in two years. Thank God she’ll have received her MFA in Creative Writing by then. That way, even though she’ll still be lacking any real idea of what she wants to do with her life, at least she’ll be massively in debt. You can contact her at or visit her at myspace.com/raininariver. You can also buy her a pony. She’s always wanted one.