LOVE CONFESSIONS: QUESTIONABLE THINGS WE DO FOR ROMANCE
words by NIA TOPALOVA
“I’m feeling like Angelina Jolie. My apartment smells of roses as I am lighting candles and listening to Lana Del Rey. We’re having a scandalously sexy bath together; I’m trying to play it cool and mysterious, but there’s too much wine involved. I sit on the side of the bathtub and suddenly I slip. I start bleeding, the guy is laughing, I am panicking… We spent the night with him pressing frozen peas against my forehead."
At the risk of exposing myself… haven’t we all been there? Well, not exactly there, since it is admittedly a specific kind of tragedy to find yourself in – but going above and beyond and behaving completely irrationally in the name of Love. It is a concept quite familiar to all of us and so the question remains: is it worth it to keep going once the craziness is no longer being returned in equal measure, and what happens when you do?
“I always expect that my lovers will do something crazy for me and they end up not doing sh*t,” Eliana offers valuable romantic guidance on how not to spend an evening lying naked on the bathroom floor, covered in rose petals and melting peas – and it consists of three deceptively simple steps:
Never pretend to like a guy’s music (especially if he’s an Italian songwriter or watches Marvel religiously.)
Never move to another country for this very same guy.
And, most importantly, never have any regrets. Catastrophe is often pure destiny, and you might just end up finding amazing friends, the coolest job, and building a new life in your dream city.
Confession number two melted my heart immediately, and it comes from Timi: always keep a Polaroid picture of your beloved one in your pocket: you never know when you might need it. You will never have to worry about losing your phone in the club for the fourth time that month, because your sweetheart will always be there, tucked into the back of the case. And if that’s still not enough for whoever finds the phone to identify you, Timi suggests taking it one step further: set your wallpaper to a picture of him too: just in case the universe needed one more way to bring you back to him.
Another valuable piece of advice comes from Veronica, who perfumes herself all over before writing to us, naturally, and insists that one should always say yes to movie stars.
Or, in a more detailed manner: say yes to downloading Tinder when you were eighteen, match with the most “disarmingly handsome boy” out there, but never actually meet since he lives in Antwerp and you live in Amsterdam. And, would you really take a three-hour bus ride for a first date with a guy you’ve never met and who could very realistically own a personal knife collection? I didn’t think so.
Then, you delete Tinder for four years (but keep his contact, just in case, because do we ever truly delete anything if there’s even a microscopic possibility of romance attached to it?)
Also because one day, you might suddenly receive a spontaneous invitation from your girlfriends to take a trip to Antwerp. You message your dreamy boy assuming he would still be single four years later – not only you receive a reply within the hour, you suddenly have a dinner reservation.
Naturally, your girls are sitting at the next table pretending to solve a Cosmopolitan quiz while secretly analysing every detail of the date. He walks in, looking strangely familiar. The quiz then instantly transforms from Cosmo to “guess which actor this beautiful man resembles.”
To summarise: never say no to anything, generally speaking, because you never know which careless “yes” will lead you toward a real movie star and the most outrageously romantic story of your life.
The last confession is perhaps the spiciest of them all, so brace yourself. It comes from a certain gentleman who wishes to keep his identity secret (for obvious reasons), and it is the following: always double-check the intentions of a PR guy before you try to network with him. Otherwise, you might end up receiving the deeply modern honour of witnessing his petite indiscrétion appear on Close Friends at 2 a.m.
Which, depending on your emotional and moral availability, can either be a social catastrophe or the beginning of a great love affair.
