Can You Write A Book While Falling in Love?
And why I am sick and tired of people's opinions on fading euphoria.
I want it all. I want to feel the joys and excitement of new love coursing through my veins, and I also want to be able to sit down and write a book for three hours. The intersection of having a state of being that you have craved your whole life and the task of writing a book which also fills your spirit is not easily guided. The lack of equilibrium makes all the sounds and senses that do not fit into those two happy places more pontificated. The leaf blower outside my window is especially annoying. I ran out of coffee filters and I have zero time to get them. No one is driving fast enough and I want to get there, but it’s all so uncertain. I am slowly filling in the words, but like a new book and new love, the page has a lot of blank spaces with possibilities. I want the stories to all turn out well. Can they both? I heard a quote today that “Finding answers closes the doors to possibility.” I love this concept and I lean into it more than I ever have.
My allotted writing time slot from 9-11 feels perilous and daunting, raw and unnerving. I have not written seriously since a romantic holiday that swept me up into the greatest levels of intimacy and honesty. What a gift to intertwine with a twin flame… how can that not be resonant for days after? Days later, when apart, I felt all the voices in my head doubting, reconciling, enjoying, the memories as they were. The aftermath of feelings. My brain wanted to tie it all up in a bow and categorize the experience, but the energetic vapors had to take their time to dispel. Writing grew to be the bastard child around the new narrative. I identify as a writer, but I also am in love and managing them both - a new book and a new love - can be powerful if I can learn how to blend the two.
What I can understand is I am in a season right now where I am feeling so many new emotions and desires in love, adventure and uncertainty that I see the page as too small a canvas. How do you take being so excited about life onto the page? What about that writing is really relatable? The happy in love books don’t really sell. You need a disaster, an arc, a crisis. I clearly am not interested in those factors in my romance, but what about in a book? Can you write about other love when you are in one love? Do the wires get crossed?
To be 53 years old and fall in love is so intense because you understand the world. You understand how precious this experience is. You don’t take it for granted. But you also are aware you have all these responsibilities you can’t fuck off on, and they seem to in a way intrude on what you have waited your whole life for. You are full of excitement to go on that next date, have that sleepover, curl your hair, look pretty, recall a kiss on your lips, the touch of hands… and sitting and writing about other stuff seems intrusive.
Can you imagine a writer going, I am going to have to delay writing my next book. I am just falling in love too hard right now to concentrate. But what if they didn’t delay writing, and spoke about what THAT feels like. People do IG posts all the time about finding love after no longer making excuses or lowering their standards. They have written the books about the divorce and the soul searching alone. But what about the book about falling in love, and how people tell you one day it will die down and normalize because no one can stay in that state of “euphoria” forever. I fight that. I find that so painful. Why? That is what I want to write about. Why we can’t sustain that state because we feel like it interrupts the rest of our lives.
This post was about something so different. I hated it so I deleted it and I wrote about a conversation I just had with someone who told me that over time the feeling of love in the way I am experiencing it now will slowly change to something more regulated. What happens if I don’t want to be regulated? What happens when we do succumb to the flatlining of love? Well, if I am naive (and I have been married twice and in a lot of small relationships so I don’t think I am), I would like to continue to write about this idea of fading euphoria. We have the brains to do what we want. We can visualize getting well, healing a sprain, getting a job. Why can’t we visualize being madly in love forever and writing books?
I have no idea how this post will land, but if you have any thoughts, I would love to hear them.