Love With A High Degree of Stupidity

Since I’m on a roll with the whole honesty thing, I’m going to disclose something else that’s quite hard to write truthfully about. I once, when I was very young, believed that I loved a pop star and I decided I was going to marry him the first moment I laid eyes on him. I was 15 years old and I had switched on Rage one Sunday morning only to see a video clip for a new Australian band called Savage Garden. 24 year old Darren Hayes took my breath away. With his cropped red hair and devilishly good looks, I knew immediately that this band was going to be huge and I wanted Darren. I wanted him right away. That day Savage Garden’s debut single ‘I Want You’ was about number 30 in the ARIA charts. It went on to hit number 4, followed by 2 number 1 singles from their debut Album. Most of you will know that between 1997 and 2005 Savage Garden sold more than 30 million albums worldwide. Their success was staggering. After Savage Garden broke up, Darren finally announced that he was gay. By this time it wasn’t a surprise to me and I was no longer harbouring a stupid degree of lust for a worldwide superstar. But in the moment it was so very real.

Okay, it wasn’t actually love at all, and I giggle about it now. But this was a man who loved his fans. And I wanted to love the same things as him because I thought he was cool. No-one else did, but it didn’t stop me from developing an addiction to vanilla flavoured chuppa chupps just because he liked them. It didn’t stop me from loving Star Wars and U2 just to be like him either! I still love Star Wars and U2. But I don’t love Dr Pepper (soft drink) I’m very sorry Darren. Foul tasting stuff. I digress. He was a breath of fresh air for me, as an introverted teenager. He made feeling like a bit of a round peg in a square hole a whole lot easier. I felt connected to him because he was a writer and he understood how it felt to be a fan.

I bring this up because having those kinds of feelings about someone famous and unattainable is quite taboo and so not cool or dignified. Yet for me, at that young age when I knew nothing at all about love, that was how I felt. It was love with a high degree of stupidity. And it was my first indication of my own capacity to love and adore another human being. Sometimes I think unrequited love/lust is an expression of a desire to have love in our life, rather than actual love itself. It’s not always entirely about that human being. It can pave the way to finding things out about ourselves. I think we look for bits of ourselves in other people. And when we come across someone who has those elements, we cling to the feeling. At last. A soulmate. But that isn’t really what it is. It’s a defence mechanism designed to help us feel less alone. To help us feel validated as a human being. Ironic isn't it, since those exact feelings tend to drag us down and feel worthless!

It pains me to say it, but there is someone else who currently fits this mould for me. I shall call him ‘Tom’ since he knows exactly who I am. I have some minimal contact with him. He is known to the country. And he is a beautiful human being to me. I say this from a different perspective than the one I had as a 15 year old pop music enthusiast. I don’t have any delusions about marrying Tom. He is happy and in love and he deserves to be. But if I am to speak the truth, I like him as a human being very much. And I have come to see him as more than a rock star. A good friend of mine summed it up the other day when she said “I think you just like who he is more than you like the music itself”. I think I feel a gravitational pull towards people who are creative and Tom just happens to have the heart of an angel. I feel silly saying it out loud. It’s not easy to write actually. But this blog is about being honest and open about how I feel about other human beings and forgiving myself for feeling things that involve a high degree of stupidity. And this man evokes something hard to describe in me. I want to be loved by someone the way I see him love his girlfriend. I feel this emotion about other couples sometimes too. I call it love envy. But it is amplified when it comes to him, because of the person he is. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel attraction, but this is less unrequited love than it is unrequited stupidity! Perhaps it just comes down to feeling a bit lonely sometimes, but that’s another blog for another day, because otherwise I’ll just get all teary.

Some of you may be wondering what the point of all this is. It may be foreign and alien to some people, but these types of feelings about people (not just well known ones either) have affected me. They shape who I am as a human being. And this is one small part of my journey to find love; to love myself and to understand who I am and what makes me tick. It’s all about finding out what ‘love actually’ is.