Searching For a Love Story on the Block Plan
How to Move on from Romantic Rock-Bottom
Article by Zeke Lloyd Art by Isabella Hageman
Last year, I tried to explain love in an email. I had a running chain of correspondence with a friend of mine. Most of them were long, rambling messages. There was no theme, so there was nothing we couldn’t talk about. On July 15th, 2022, I tried to break down love.
I remember your theory on first love, this idea that we always have something special for the first person we loved. I disagree. I had lunch with my first girlfriend today, and honestly didn't feel anything.
It comes down to one simple thing: people change. Sitting across from her, I saw a kind, confident, and wonderful person. She wasn't the person I loved, though. That's ok. That's what I was asking about with your lifelong best-friend. I was just curious to hear if anything had changed, but it sounds like you two changed together. I think that's one reason your friendship still works so well. Sitting across from my ex-girlfriend today, I realized we did not change together. If she and I met today, there would be no spark.
Around February, when I started working on this piece, I set out again to figure out what love is.
Maybe the answer has been in front of me the whole time. At every wedding I’ve ever been to, happy fiancés have shared a biblical definition. “Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant.”
But that’s always been a little too abstract – over said and under explained.
Candidly, my quest to understand love began the first time I ever saw a romantic comedy. At this point, I don’t remember which movie it was. I’d like to think it was When Harry Met Sally, but maybe it was an older classic my parents showed me like Philadelphia Story or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I was always taken with Jimmy Stewart’s anxious yet passionate demeanor. But as much as I want my fascination to have begun with a feature-length film shared across the generational gap, I suspect it was something I found on my own. So, while I’m not proud to admit it, my best guess is that I fell in love with romantic comedies the first time I saw Taylor Swift’s You Belong with Me music video.
But whatever it was, it didn’t take long for me to become infatuated with films about romance. I’ve always found something magical about the genre. I lost interest in fantasy at a young age; it was too removed. But rom coms, that’s something to believe in – the perfect insertion of mysticism.
But it is a tough genre to love.
There were seven of us in the Washington, D.C. hotel room. It was a school trip, put on for the Model UN team. The three upperclassmen present, myself among them, selected the Netflix original romantic comedy Set It Up as that night’s film of choice.
It was not a popular pick.
“How could anyone believe this is real,” pondered one freshman. “It’s bullshit. It’s a bullshit movie,” added a sophomore. I didn’t mind much. I laughed. I saw the magic. I devoured the secret connection between the main characters. It gave me hope.
The hecklers had a point, though. A friend of mine, the same one I emailed my thoughts on love, even called the genre “pornography for the romantic.”
The plots aren’t plausible. They’re manufactured. But I wanted them to be real.
So, when I heard that the theme for this issue was “Promise Me,” I jumped on it. Finally, the opportunity to write a true love story. I could prepare a real-world defense of fantastical love.
And I knew the perfect couple. Michael and Sienna had been together for almost two years. They checked every box – loyal, energetic, effective communicators. And because I was talking about love, not just what makes two people click, I interviewed friends, acquaintances, and even exes on the subject.
Now, after working on this project for a few months, the interviews blend together. The process is the same for each one. I reach out, we agree on a time to meet, they answer my questions, then I look through my scribbled notes to find their most impactful sentiments.
Then I do it all again.
I interviewed Michael and Sienna on five or six different occasions for this project. Outside of that, I talked to five people. In total, I have a combined ten hours of formal interviews. After I listened through all of the interviews, after I wrote their stories, I gave up trying to write a nonfiction account of their love.
It’s impossible to write a true love story.
I only ever write the love story I want. I can’t take myself out of the equation. Everything I want from love, everything I already think it is, there’s a million little biases which have built a wall between me and objective understanding.
Ironically, it’s the same reason my search for love has been so emotionally taxing.
Reality has escaped me. I’ve lost track somewhere along the way. Like those on screen, the people I’ve dated have become characters. I manifested them, I used the almighty idea of “love” to justify a subconscious deification.
It’s the opposite of a relationship at its end. In a dying relationship, you start to see someone as worse than they ever were. They’re annoying, frustrating, intolerable. Every little thing they do fits into the maniacal mold you made for them.
But afterward, once it ends in a fiery disaster, your whole mentality is reversed. You create a fantastical character. You make them into the Sally to your Harry. Because as much as you want to move on, missing them still gives you more than letting go. In missing them, you hold on to a version of them that loved you.
I hate missing someone on the Block Plan. The other day, sitting at one of the high tables in Rastall’s, I tried to figure out love. You can know you were in love, I thought, when you feel a twinge every time you see them. It’s a funny feeling that starts in your stomach. Then your head freezes. Your eyes lock, and for a moment you know you could look away if you wanted to, but you don’t want to.
It’s not because you crave reunion. You don’t want to get back together. And while one of the worst parts of missing someone is the dreaded mental montage, that series of consecutive flashbacks featuring them, always smiling, in the places where you had your happiest moments, that’s not what the twinge is.
Because it’s not that complicated. The twinge is just the way you feel when you’re reminded that they exist. They’re a real, breathing person with skin and stature and all the physical features you loved about them. And for the time they stay in your vision, you can’t deny their existence. You’re forced to accept that they kept living without you - moving and growing and changing. They’ve done everything. They’ve lived a hundred lives and there’s the proof, the skin and stature and everything you loved about them standing right there.
And you remember what’s not real - the relationship. That’s not breathing and growing and changing. That doesn’t exist anymore.
I don’t think I loved anyone in high school, but I have been in love on the Block Plan. And now I feel a twinge almost every time I walk through Worner.
At first, I saw my piece as an opportunity to write a real love story, a chance to pen my defense of the rom com. But for those of you reading because you’re interested in finding the secret sauce that makes a relationship as magical as the one featured in Set It Up, I doubt it will surprise you to learn that I wasn’t able to find it.
Because from the beginning, I didn’t want to defend rom coms. Not really. I wanted to answer a much simpler question, the same question that everyone asks themselves when a relationship ends: what would have made it work?
That’s much easier than moving on. So, I did interviews, philosophizing about the grand idea of love. In an early draft, back when I was writing a nonfiction account of Michael and Sienna’s history, one of my editors called the piece “very journalistic.”
That’s how I wanted it. Removed. I didn’t want to be in the story because putting myself in the story meant moving on and understanding that missing someone isn’t fixed by reminiscing and romanticizing.
And rom coms don’t help. After watching enough movies, it seems easy to stop missing someone. When you’re hopeless, lying at a romantic rock-bottom, the right person manifests themself from somewhere you never anticipated.
But moving on isn’t glamorous enough to put in a 90-minute Netflix original.
Moving on is forgetting - forgetting so much that you can love someone else. Forgetting the way you felt, forgetting what made you feel that way, forgetting who you were with them. It’s becoming someone different. Because if you stayed the same, you could never be happy with anyone else.
And let’s face it, moving on is the only way to have a true love story on the Block Plan.