Yes, I know, romantic love is overly valued in comparison to all the other loves. Still, before I am accused of “hetero-normative-romantic-centeredness”, it is important to distinguish the primary loves, each equally important but fulfilling distinct and profound emotional needs. Familial love is naturally binding and the closest to unconditional. Friendship where you are chosen and loved for who you are. Then romantic love, which ambitiously attempts to combine the first two, more specifically, a love where another chooses you not only to support but to share a vision of a life that both of you would build together. Biblically, when two become one. Sex being undeniably a key factor here (which makes the HIV factor awkward), and the biological product of the \u201cone\u201d being a potential child is never underestimated. To simplify, an example: if I were to get a job in some faraway place, this love would be for the person who chooses to uproot their life and come build one with me, as us. I think that is a powerful type of love that most, if not all of us, pray to experience at least once in our lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alas, almost thirty-three and I have never been in a relationship. Not to be mistaken for never having been desired or indulging in desire (I need to write a separate piece to fully unpack the nuances of HIV and desire). I only know of love, but I haven\u2019t felt it. The loneliness that comes with HIV is not only in the stigmatisation but in the profound need to shed the burden of unlovable-ness. I understood earlier than most children the reality that I was going to die someday, possibly before someone ever loved me. This is still an unreconcilable hurt I feel in my adulthood. I think how pathetic it is of me to hold on to a twelve-year-old\u2019s heartbreak. I am thirty-two, living during a resurgence of 1950s trad wife conservatism, \u201csprinkle sprinkle\u201d dating advice, an uptick in incel men, and still wanting a boyfriend. I am constantly grappling with loneliness, trying to figure it out. Is it my HIV or feminism that is preventing me from getting this boyfriend? I just know God is rolling Their eyes, \u201cAll this intellect and still this dusty whisper of a prayer request \u2013 a boyfriend, really? Flowers and chocolates, \u201cI love you, never could live without you, let’s build a home, let’s travel\u2013LIES. You want that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have perfected intellectualisation. I am much more feminist, much more logical, I lie and say I am much more mature than I was at twelve, on that night.\u00a0 God does not care because I\u2019ve convinced myself that I do not either. I deem my singleness as some ideological strength, some practice in de-centring men and romance, as evidence that I am actively dismantling the patriarchal system. Surely, if I wanted a boyfriend, I would have had one. I see how women who have men get them. They put themselves out there, they wear the dresses, know how to do the make-up, lose the weight, cook most times, if not every day and have the happily storied rectangular framed lives on Instagram. That could be me, too, but I tell myself I am a better feminist. When you are alone with no one to text incessantly about your day, you\u2019re left with only the ideological win. When you can\u2019t admit to yourself that you perhaps fall short of a system\u2019s standard, the only way to save face is by subverting it. How many of us are leftists because we are broke? How many of us are feminists because we are lonely?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, of course, there are a variety of legitimate reasons for one\u2019s politics. My cognitive dissonance in acknowledging the lie of patriarchy that pushes women, since they were girls, towards the dream of Prince Charming, white dress, fairytale wedding and marriage, is constantly in conflict with the yearning of a lonely inner child. I do not have an answer for the child, but I have proof against patriarchy. I have the theory and survive the dissonance only through thought, humanity as described by Rene Descartes, \u201cCognito, ergo sum\u201d: I think, therefore I am. Thus, a separation from my body into my mind, existing as \u201ca knowing\u201d fed by other already existing knowledges. I wonder if this grand consciousness, I believe to be subverting the systems, is also fooling me into an unbecoming. I am not arguing that I should discard feminism and get married (I\u2019m aware of the statistics regarding unhappiness for married women), but I am denying myself the feeling, the admittance, heartache and the answer to the question that lingers from my childhood, \u201cWho is going to love me?” by hiding behind an ideological identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The personal philosophical mission for most people in life is to be who they really are. It is difficult. If you manage to overcome the social constructs of woman, black, and HIV positive (which is nearly impossible), you will face the question, \u201cWhat now?\u201d The alternatives become prescriptive too, whereby I feel I cannot be romantically lonely because I am a feminist. Nobody says it exactly like that, but people expect intellectualism always to be above emotion. My consciousness must always float above my body. The mission is to go back to one\u2019s true self. I have not determined where one\u2019s true self is located. We speak of a soul (that might be too deep to unpack in this writing), but I considered Audre Lorde\u2019s erotic – an assertion of life force, creative energy empowered, internal knowledge reclaimed and respected <\/em>from that twelve-year-old sobbing girl. Lorde\u2019s warning was that if we lived outside ourselves and only by external directives, rather than internal knowledge and needs, then our lives were limited by the external and alien forms, and we would conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s.<\/em> I certainly believe that feminism is a movement based on human need, yet if I am truly a subverter, then I must admit to myself that subscribing only to logic and theory, as superior to intuition, that head can function without heart or my consciousness without a body, is a betrayal of myself and all that I could fully bring to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve spent many Valentine’s Days alone (read un-partnered), and each of those, I\u2019ve thought about that twelve-year-old girl. I\u2019ve interrogated and wrung her for pathetic-ness and internalised patriarchy to deny myself ever feeling sad and lonely. Whilst sadness and loneliness do not feel liberatory, the erotic says, \u201cI feel therefore I can be free\u201d. So instead, this Valentine’s Day, I yearned for that erotic. I wanted to feel as much as I thought. I want to make decisions, write, and live from feeling as much as from thinking. I no longer wanted to hide behind some \u201cknowing\u201d and to sit in the uncertainty of \u201cwill it ever work out?\u201d and to conjure a self-love that was not logical or an external shield, but a deep feeling of one\u2019s true self.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” 1981.\u00a0Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches<\/em>, Crossing Press, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not A Luxury.” 1981.\u00a0Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches<\/em>, Crossing Press, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Even then, it felt like a memory. I haven\u2019t been properly anchored to my body since. I only know my body for what it represents: black, woman, and HIV+ (and hesitantly, I could also add fat). It wouldn\u2019t be exact to say that what floats above and looks down upon my body is my spirit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"\n Reflections on the Erotic for Valentine\u2019s Day<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Even then, it felt like a memory. I haven\u2019t been properly anchored to my body since. I only know my body for what it represents, black, woman and HIV+ (and hesitantly, I could also add fat). It wouldn\u2019t be exact to say that what floats above and looks down upon my body is my spirit or soul. I consider it consciousness \u2013 \u201ca knowing\u201d. I experience myself as a concept, as some sort of theory that is fed by other theories but not an actual person. I do not know if the theory of me is well-established but certainly my existence as one came to be on the night I learned of my HIV status.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I find it particularly sad that at twelve years old, the most consuming apprehension was that nobody was ever going to love me. \u201cWho is going to love me? Who is going to love me now? I sob-screamed and snotty-nosed into the tear-drenched pillow praying to the Lord. There hasn\u2019t been a response yet. God doesn\u2019t seem care about getting me a boyfriend. God may point to the abundance of love from my family and friends \u2013 there is so much love there, but the embarrassing truth is, it was specifically romantic love I was mourning for. \u201cWhat does a [twelve-year old] know about antiretrovirals [and love]?\u201d<\/em>1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, I know, romantic love is overly valued in comparison to all the other loves but before I am accused of \"heteronormative-romantic-centeredness\", it is important to distinguish the primary loves, each equally important but fulfilling distinct and profound emotional need. Familial love that is naturally binding and the closest to unconditional. Friendship where you are chosen and loved for who you are. Then romantic love which ambitiously attempts to combine the first two, more specifically a love where another chooses you not only to support but share a vision of a life that both of you would build together. Biblically, when two become one. Sex is undeniably a key factor here and the biological product of the \u201cone\u201d being a child is huge (which makes the HIV factor very tricky). To simplify though, for me, the example scenario that clarifies it is, if I were to get a job in some far away place, this love would be in the person who chooses to uproot their life and come build a life with me as us. I think that is a powerful type of love that most, if not all of us, pray to experience at least once in our lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alas, almost thirty-three and I have never been in a relationship. Not to be mistaken for never having been desired or indulging in desire (the nuances of HIV and desire require their own piece of writing to fully unpack). I only know of love, but I haven\u2019t felt it. The loneliness that comes with HIV is not only in the stigmatisation but in the profound need to shed the burden of unloveableness. I understood earlier than most children the reality that I was going to die someday, possibly before someone ever loved me. This is still an unreconcilable hurt I feel in my adulthood. I think how pathetic it is of me to hold on to a twelve-year-old\u2019s heartbreak. I am thirty-two, living during a time of 1950s tradwife conservativism resurgence, \u201csprinkle sprinkle\u201d dating advice, uptick of incel men and still wanting a boyfriend. I am constantly grappling with loneliness trying to figure it out, is it my HIV or feminism that is preventing me from getting this boyfriend. I just know God is rolling Their eyes, \u201cAll this intellect and still this dusty whisper of a prayer request \u2013 a boyfriend really? Flowers and chocolates, \u201cI love yous, never could live without yous, let build a home, lets travel \u2013 LIES. You want that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have perfected intellectualisation. I am much more feminist, much more logical, I lie and say I am much more mature than I was at twelve, on that night. God does not care because I\u2019ve convinced myself that I do not either. I deem my singleness as some ideological strength, some practice in decentring men and romance, as evidence that I am actively dismantling the patriarchal system. Surely, if I wanted a boyfriend, I would have had one. I see all the ways that women who have men get them \u2013 they put themselves out there, they wear the dresses, know how to do the make-up, lose the weight, cook most times, if not every day and have the happily storied rectangular framed lives on Instagram. That could be me too, but I tell myself I am a better feminist. When you are alone with no one to text incessantly about your day, you\u2019re left with only the ideological win. When you can\u2019t admit to yourself that you perhaps fall short of a system\u2019s standard, the only way to save face is in subverting it. How many of us are leftist because we are broke? How many of us are feminists because we are lonely?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, of course, there are a variety of legitimate reasons for one\u2019s politics. My cognitive dissonance of acknowledging the lie of patriarchy that pushes women, since they were girls, towards the dream of prince charming and the white dress, fairytale wedding and marriage are constantly in conflict with the yearning of a lonely inner child. I do not have an answer for the child, but I have proof against patriarchy. I have the theory and survive the dissonance only through thought \u2013 humanity as described by Rene Descartes, \u201cCognito, ergo sum\u201d \u2013 I think, therefore I am. Thus, a separation from my body into my mind, existing as \u201ca knowing\u201d fed by other already existing knowledges. I wonder if this grand consciousness, I believe to be subverting the systems is also fooling me into an unbecoming. I am not arguing that I should discard feminism and get married (I\u2019m aware of the statistics regarding unhappiness for married women) but I am denying myself the feeling, the admittance, heartache and the answer to the question that lingers from my childhood, \u201cwho is going to love me? by hiding behind an ideological identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The personal philosophical mission for most people in life is to be who you really are. It is difficult. If you ever do overcome the social constructs of woman, black, HIV positive (almost impossible to overcome), you will be struck with the question of, \u201cwhat now?\u201d The alternatives too become prescriptive whereby I feel I cannot be romantically lonely because I am feminist. Nobody says it like that exactly, but it is expected that intellectualism always be above the emotional. My consciousness must always float above my body. The mission is to go back to one\u2019s true self. I have not determined where one\u2019s true self is located. We speak of a soul (that might be too deep to unpack in this writing) but I considered Audre Lorde\u2019s erotic - an assertion of life force, creative energy empowered, internal knowledge reclaimed and respected from that twelve-year-old sobbing girl. 2<\/a><\/sup>Lorde\u2019s warning was that if we lived outside ourselves and only by external directives, rather than internal knowledge and needs, then our lives were limited by the external and alien forms and we would conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual.3<\/a><\/sup> I certainly believe that feminism is a movement based on human need yet if I am truly a subverter then I must admit to myself that subscribing only to logic and theory, as superior to intuition, that head can function without heart or my consciousness without a body is a betrayal to myself and all that I could fully bring to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve spent many valentines alone (read unpartnered) and each of those I\u2019ve thought about that twelve-year-old girl. I\u2019ve interrogated and wrung her for patheticness and internalised patriarchy to deny myself of ever feeling sad and lonely. Whilst sadness and loneliness do not feel liberatory, the erotic says, \u201cI feel therefore I can be free\u201d.4<\/a><\/sup> So instead, this Valentines I yearned for that erotic. I wanted to feel as much as I thought. I want to make decisions, write and live from feeling as much as from thinking. I no longer wanted hide behind some \u201cknowing\u201d and to be able to sit in the uncertainty of \u201cwill it ever work out?\u201d and conjured a self-love that was not logical or an external shielding but a deep feeling of one\u2019s true self.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n REFERENCES:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","_et_gb_content_width":"1080","footnotes":"[]"},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/namedconquer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Flowers-Thumbnail-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n