#5 Tiktok corecore & talking with my sister
about conversations with elders about love, relationships and timing
I spent last Saturday celebrating a friend's 28th birthday at his house, the afternoon light dwindling into evening in the living room. Lately I've been preferring house parties for their intimacy, the way conversations weave through the crowd and land in your lap, unexpected and unassuming. I landed upon one of those with a guy I’d just met there, going through topics and questions for most of the day. It was the kind of conversation that keeps you guessing for no apparent reason, other than the curiosity of meeting someone new for the sake of newness. I felt drawn to him the more we spoke, until he left the party with a thank-you for the great conversation and a friendly hug.
Should I ask for his number or leave mine? The question kept me guessing until Sunday evening, so my friend dropped him my contact a day later at my request, a small act of vulnerability, a way of reminding myself that if I'm rejected I won't die!
It's something so inane and everyday that I know it sounds a bit laughable. But in the pursuit of meeting people and wondering where these connections could land us, I decided to give it a try.
He wasn't interested in anything further than conversation, which I took in stride. I think of it as exposure therapy to rejection. I think the more comfortable you get with being rejected, the more comfortable you become with yourself. It can hold up a mirror to who you are and let you accept yourself.
I think accepting rejection is also accepting you're not for everyone, and everyone is not for you —which in itself, is a very readily accepted truth— in the process it's also some kind of way to microdose vulnerability (lol this sounds insufferable but it's true).
I've decided to take an indefinite break from dating apps, not because they're evil (even though I feel they've had some shitty consequences on how we relate to each other and distorted the idea of what we owe one another, but I digress), but because I was closing myself off from serendipity a bit too much. I hated the idea of ambiguity, of not knowing whether someone I've met at a bar/party/any other event is into me like that or not.
Yet talking with that guy was interesting, because it turns out I don't hate ambiguity as much as I thought. I'd go even as far as to say that it's magnetic —not to know whether there's mutual attraction yet— because it kept me guessing. And I think that makes for great chemistry, even if all it lasts, and all it's intended for, is the few hours in between.
I was just home the past month and a half, which led to spending a lot of time with my oldest siblings, my aunts and uncles, my dad. The topic of love and dating came up a few times, like it naturally does; not in the annoying “where's your boyfriend” way, but in the genuinely curious way (which is really refreshing, especially when you're a straight woman in a Latin context). It must've also been my own attitude towards it that's loosened, relaxed, because once I shared that I'd been dating but not arrived at any long-term relationships, the responses were along the same lines each time: a smile, a knowing look, and a simple truth. “It happens naturally, everything has its own timing. It'll come.”
I loved the certainty they said it with, the fluidity of it, not a moment of hesitation. I wonder if my friends and I could benefit from exiting our bubble of twenty-somethings in the city and into more conversations with our elders, especially when it comes to finding love, nurturing it, what to do when we lose it, or how to grieve it. (This book was one of the most helpful to me, when my family's wisdom wasn't accessible).
My mom's cousin, entering her forties, is grappling with anxiety, trying to understand her need to control, achieve, manage, fix, which inevitably bleeds into her romantic pursuits. My dad, entering his sixties, says that companionship should take priority above all else when looking for a partner; that love has its highs and lows but partnership that is steady, sustained, can last forever.
It makes me think of the stark contrast with the insecurity many of my friends and I look at love with at times, the depth of it and look of it making us wonder if we're lovable enough, if we're ever going to know it. For the first half of my twenties, I felt like love was this out-of-world experience that only a complicit few tasted this early on in life.
It felt like an invisible language I could see the effects of, but never quite learn. Through my dating app endeavors the past six years I saw myself evolve, going from an anxious stream of consciousness of I hope they'll like me. Do they like me? Am I interesting enough? to how do they make me feel? Do I like them? Is my curiosity piqued?
Now I'm twenty six, which feels like a pretty normal age to be at when you start thinking more deeply about relationships, dating, and the many different ways we all try to love each other. Going home this year I relaxed into conversations about relationships with my eldest sister, eight years my senior, and realized that even when there's love, reciprocity, longevity, there's difficulties that take other shapes and forms, sometimes out of your control.
The questions that rear their ugly heads at night sometimes leave for a while, but sometimes they also return in the form of small, cracking doubts: Could this be it? Is this as good as things will get? Is this love worth the sacrifice? Worth the effort? And I'm afraid there's no right answer for any of it. Watching my sister grapple with the past four years of her relationship showed me that all we can do is hope and love each other the best ways we know how, and hope they keep their word to do the same, for however long it's meant to last.
She tells me to take my time, to lay back and concern myself with other things when it comes to my own love life. She got married at twenty six, divorced by thirty, and is very adamant about letting me know that there's plenty of time for committing to a relationship. Almost like all the time in the world. She tells me, under no circumstances, to marry early. I laugh because the closest thing I know to marriage is my address registration at the Amsterdam city hall. Till taxes (or moving) do us part.
The truth is that there's a lot of tranquility in listening to my older family members talk about love: the search for it is not really a search, they all maintain (albeit in different words), but more like something natural that evolves on its own, taking a life and sitting with you, alongside you and your lover. That there's plenty of time. That everything arrives on its own timing, you're never late for it, but that somehow you should know you there's consequences to being too early. Too early to commit, or decide, or seal a fate. Even then, there's comfort in it, I think, to have tried than to not have done it at all. (But maybe that's just my naive optimism).
The other truth is that in the context of my generation —or more accurately, the generation that's on tiktok, twitter and instagram in an endless loop— there are a lot of ideas about how to date. There's a lot of playbooks, rules, red flags, all of them borderline psychosomatic, pushing real symptoms to the surface. I think a lot of us struggle with feeling a bit lonely. There's competing narratives for what makes love real, what's a love worth investing in, what makes it different from situationships, to just measuring the worth of a person depending on how much money they have, and if they're willing to spend any of it on you. Many of these ideas aren't new, I think, but the way in which they've spread over the internet, like a panicked wildfire, is. There's so much information about how to date, what to look out for, what to be safe of. It's overwhelming at best and outright depressing at worst.
I stumbled upon this tiktok (below) the other day and had to laugh. In response to the endless string of hot takes on modern dating, a new genre emerged: corecore. An amalgamation of all kinds of videos centered around a particular topic, sometimes concluding with a sort of message, sometimes making no sense at all other than just to magnify a trend of the times. Call attention to it.
After the first urge to laugh, I felt a push to cry.
It's very clear that there's a sense of vague desperation behind everything we're clicking on when it comes to dating and relationships online. The way we're looking at a video app to tell us —or at the very least, give us signs— of what we should look for, what we should approve of, what's accepted or derided by our peers. Living in the 21st century also means living in the context of the internet, and whether you're on tiktok or not, I promise you'll feel its repercussions and arguments elsewhere. In conversations with friends at the bar. Over coffee with an old acquaintance. On a date itself. It's because the themes have always been the same, but they've been magnified by the very human desire to connect in a world that is increasingly difficult to parse from the screen.
It's a brave new world, but it's also terrifying.
Visiting my elders made me feel a lot like the last seconds of that corecore video. Warm, knowing, almost certain of the future. It's not to say I'm certain of whether or not I'll have a lifelong partner at some point, whether we'll be together until we're old or if we'll part ways somewhere in between.
It's more like having some sort of solace in knowing that even though there's competing voices when it comes to relationships —how to build them, how to choose them, how to sustain them— there's a beautiful inevitability to knowing that they will find their way, a mix of possibility, luck and openness that, at the end of the day, is the most important.
Dating can be fun, lighthearted, playful even. But it can also be tiring. You're hoping someone's going to see how deeply flawed you are and love you for all of it —you're hoping they'll make you feel at home— there's a lot of vulnerability, and I think most of us, when we're new to it, don't really know how to pair it best with physical intimacy, that sneaky little thing that makes you feel like you've known them forever when you're in the midst of it. Happy in the haze of it, not knowing whether you can see your hand in front of you, but feeling like you'll reach out and touch anyway, regardless of the consequences. It's intoxicating at best, infuriating at worst.
At the very least, I hope to keep that sense of comfort in the knowledge that even in the barrage of opinions about love, that everyone finds each other. When it's time to go home, it's time to leave all those warning signs behind, promising to protect you. They cage you in instead. And maybe I'll talk with my oldest aunt more often, imagine a life where love is abundant even when it shows up in ways I didn't expect. Take the time to know people, spend less time wondering what to say. Stop only looking for advice in a bubble of twenty somethings and ask questions to people who have lived much longer than I have; that one's important.
After all, there is much to learn from people who saw the Sun first.