Love in the Bubble — Issue 282

“Making a playlist is getting what you want to say without actually saying it. You get to use someone else’s poetry to express how you feel,” utters Rob in the show High Fidelity (2020). Teenage me related to that on a deep level — my love language was all about receiving and sending playlists (especially if Jeff Buckley was involved). 

The modern playlist of our generation is a new mutation of love: situationships. These have permeated our generation, and the St Andrews community is merely its tight-knit microcosm. Situationships are defined by a mutual interest in one another and a vagueness in communicating one’s emotions. Bell Hooks explains it perfectly in All About Love: as a society, we place too much emphasis on romantic love, and the devaluation of platonic forms of love creates an absence we may not perceive when we aim to find romance. Situationships bridge this loneliness by providing a great trade-off: in theory, they assure us that it will not get too serious. They have the casual breath of a friendship, avoiding the necessary time commitment, pressure, and existential questioning of ending up with ‘the one’. 

In many ways, talking about love in friendships and situationships has become taboo, and a lot of people rely on the arts, may it be a playlist or a poem, to pinpoint and communicate their feelings. At university, where many conversations delve into crushes, hookups, and ‘seeing each other’, it is very rare to come across ones searching for deeper levels of feelings. Reading Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments was eye-opening to my understanding of how love should be voiced. The author divides the different aspects of love into “figures of thought,” reflecting situations of expressing love in which you can get lost. People who constantly want to be in control of their lives will avoid passionate and desperate love. People who are afraid of falling and want to handle everything like an object will distance themselves from love.