Love Like Lip Filler

On being single on Valentine's Day, plumping up shriveled hearts, and having good girlfriends

For almost every Valentine’s Day of my life, I have been single.

I have wanted to be in love my entire life, from the moment I saw Love Actually (minus the sex scenes that my mother fast-forwarded through). I remember being small, maybe six or seven, watching Hugh Grant rush to his love interest’s flat, helplessly in love and desperate for her to love him back. And she, equally as desperate and in love, rushes to him. I always craved that version of love—the kind that is built upon such adoration, desire, and respect that it must practically burst from you else you implode.

Despite my wanting to be in love, it didn’t happen for me until I was an adult. I never had that high school sweetheart, just flickering flames in uni that all eventually puttered out. So, love, elusive for me, became all the more enticing. I prayed for it, kneeling next to my bed night after night, begging God to send me someone who would love me. Someone I could love.

What I failed to realize, though, was that love, in spite of my best efforts, often ends in heartbreak. So, last year, after falling in love (and falling in love with love), I had my heart broken. Finally, I had achieved my objective—I had received love like lip filler, injected into my heart to plump it up. Then it dissolved, leaving my heart a wrinkly prune.

What I missed most about this love was how abundant it felt—how I could give and receive so freely, thinking it would always be there, eternally replenished. For those first few weeks after, I wondered if my heart could pump without it or if it would always be shriveled up.

I was most frustrated by the fact that I could not simply revive myself. Everyone, from my mother to my best friends, kept telling me to give it time. My heart would restart on its own. But on those cold Fall mornings after, I would wake up, roll over, and see my still-shriveled heart sitting on my pillow. I would cry and cry, not because I wanted to see him there, but because I missed how my heart used to rhythmically beat, how I used to feel it in my chest, warm and oozing with being ‘in love’.

Hadn’t my heart been big and beating before him? I had had love there, pulsing and gushing; I was sure of it. But I had become so dependent on receiving that romantic love that I had forgotten what it was to receive platonic love or to generate love myself.

Every time I end a phone call with my mother, we exchange ‘I love you’s. Even when we’re texting and have to end our current thread of thoughts, we end with, ‘I LOVEEEEEE YOU!!’ (Variations include ‘I love you’ in emojis, gifs, and other media.) I cannot recall a single day of my life in which my mom did not assure me that she loved me, that she reached through the phone and splashed some love into my heart.

Right after the heartbreak, my mom flew to London to peel me off my sofa. She held my hand and told me she loved me, as if I had forgotten. She cradled me like an infant and took me out to nice dinners. I was miserable to be around, but she, without any agenda, was simply there for me, pouring aperol spritzes down my throat and love into my soul.

That kind of love is what restarted my heart. One of my friends sat on FaceTime with me for three hours, watching me slowly eat a bowl of mac and cheese and listening to every one of my idiosyncratic thoughts. My flatmates and I sat around analyzing the parts that made no sense. No one had any concrete explanations, just tissues and proclamations of platonic love.

Nearly everything I know about love, I've learnt from my long-term friendships with women.

—Dolly Alderton, ‘Everything I Know About Love’

It was from those women in my life, some wiser and some just as naive as me, that I relearned how to pump love back into my heart. With time and their help, I watched my heart slowly swell up again, red and blue and beating.

Sometimes, in the peak of my self-deprecation, I wonder if I will ever be in love again or if I was never meant to be in love in the first place. Then, I receive a letter in the mail from a girlfriend in curly handwriting: “Just thinking of you, my love!” It smells like her Gucci floral perfume.

I had waited to be in love my entire life, just to realize that I had already been in love many times before. Love practically hung in the air particles around me, from my friends to my family to a stranger who complimented my jacket in line at Gail’s. It was narrow thinking—to believe that all my Valentine’s Days had been spent alone before I was in that sort of miserable romantic love. Really, all my Valentine’s Days have been filled with chocolate hearts from my mom and pink cosmos with my ‘galentines’. Their love has been the most honest, the most worthwhile.

When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.

—Dolly Alderton, ‘Everything I Know About Love’

No romantic love is worth misery, especially when you can pump your heart with love from your friends, from yourself. Really, I am grateful for that year of being in love because, without it, I might have never realized that I already had love up to my ears. I had looked for love in all the wrong places; it was sitting in plain sight—in inside jokes, shared tubes of lipgloss, and midnight conversations in pub smoking areas.

While I might be romantically single, I have never really spent a Valentine’s Day alone. I still ache to be in love, for there is nothing quite like it. I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss that romance. But the love that is the most fulfilling is the love that tells you your lips look better after you get that filler dissolved. You don’t believe it at first—your lips looked so pillowy before, and now the wrinkles you wanted to get rid of are back in droves. But soon, when the blood returns back to the tiny veins around your mouth, you recognize the face that you had seen in the mirror before you added anything to it. It is, inexplicably, you—the you that cleans your flatmate’s dirty pots and pans for them because you know they’ve had a long day; the you that buys yourself a croissant after every job rejection; the you that your friends had fallen in love with on playground swing sets and in frat house basements and at dull networking events. There was never anything wrong with you; you didn’t need the filler anyway.

Love you, mean it.