EP: 18 tiktok asks: how to love | video essay

0:00 Howdy y'all. Ooh La La happy February. It is very very cold again today. Well, as of filming, when I release this there'll probably be some kind of heat wave and it'll just be embarrassing. But Cie La Vie. Well, it is the month of February, and I wanted to do lovey-dovey themes this month, but love is year round baby, like it really is. Before we get into this, I want to share some really important information with you guys, I um got my eyebrows done. And I didn't know that this existed, but I got them filled in--- with henna. And it was so affordable, and it was so cheap and this is just a PSA that everyone should do this immediately right now. I'm gonna show you guys up close and personal what my eyebrows look like, look like I'm freaking yellow oh my Lord. All right, that was a YouTube exclusive, so you guys on the podcast unfortunately don't get to see the funky fresh eyebrows. I've been trying to record this video for a while, I microwaved my coffee twice, so let's freaking get into this.

1:18 Hey! Welcome to Reese Grey Analyzes, I'm Reese! And thank you so much for deciding to Adventure with me today. on Reese Grey analyzes, we look at Creations in art, media, music, and even video games to explore exactly why we think the way we think, question what we believe, and learn something new! No doubt the media we consume influences how we think about love and how we treat ourselves and love ourselves as well so this video will be split into three parts so part one the popularization of self-love as selfishness, part two how do we learn how to love, and part three sexual and romantic love and intimacy. Timestamps are in the description and Source notes on reesegrey.com that's r e e s e g r e y.com.

2:00 We all know that love and relationships and intimacy is much more nuanced and deeper than like a one minute tiktok, especially one from a stranger and without context. And although we all get that, it's really easy to fall into the Trap of hearing sound bites, and really strongly identifying with those and not giving them any further thought and getting those sound bites kind of stuck in your head and becoming a mantra for the way that you treat others or treat yourself or allow others to treat you. For example, this Tiktok trend of red flags can also make you question your like healthy relationships and can lead people to become paranoid, or like accusatory because it convinces them that completely normal behaviors and healthy human behaviors are a sign of something to be worried about. And these simple things can be like checking your phone, leaving the house without telling your partner what you're doing, having friends at all, or having friends of the opposite sex, or the lack of jealousy from a partner when you go and hang out with your friend friends, wearing certain clothing or having social media at all. These aren't things that are red flags these are things that if you feel uncomfortable with you communicate with your partner in denote boundaries.

And it's okay to feel jealous, and it's okay to feel lost and it's okay to feel confused and it's okay to be unsure of where your boundaries lie. A healthy relationship makes it a safe place to talk and explore those boundaries in a way where you're able to compromise and sometimes people aren't willing to compromise on certain behaviors and that's fair, and that's fine, and it just means if you're not able to compromise on something in the other person for them it's a deal breaker it's just something that means your relationship isn't going to work out and that's okay. And I think we're so afraid to communicate that we create these arbitrary check boxes that we just expect people to follow instead of talking and being vulnerable about what we want. So figuring out what love looks like and feels like is a really popular topic between you know all ages of people, because the way you view yourself and others and what you want and need changes with age.

4:20 And we can see on social media, especially Tiktok nowadays, people trying to figure out how to both love themselves and love others and to figure out how to love ourselves and others better we have to understand where our ideas of love comes from, or our concept of love comes from. And how we learn to love is usually so different based on how we've been taught to communicate within our families, education, and in sometimes religion views on sex and sexuality aren't usually consciously formed really influenced by people around you especially in Youth and then more consciously formed later. And that's mostly because conversations around sex and intimacy and love are really difficult to have, ideas of Love Are crafted by our everyday experiences we get hints on how to love each other by how our parents treat us and treat each other and in some cases what religion teaches us and what we learn in school, but of course the lessons that mostly stick are by trying to love others and by what you learn when others love you. So we learn to love by trying to love. So by dating, or just friendships.

On top of people's natural biological need for closeness and friendships and love, it gets really tiresome to figure out how to love yourself let alone other people so let's take this adventure together and kind of figure out how to love ourselves and others better so let's jump into part one self-love in the popularization of love as selfishness. So love, a lot of time and memes and popular media is described the self-love is honoring your own needs, and what you need and what you desire and what you want which is really really great advice but to a point. And you hear this this cliche phrase like you gotta love yourself before you love someone else and we all collectively throw up because we hate cliches.

But if you grew up only knowing like selfish love, and only knowing people who practice this type of selfish uncommunicative love, who honored their own desires and let everyone else figure it out for themselves, if nobody talked to you about having a good sense of self, being good to yourself because you're worth it, you won't inherently just know how to love yourself if you weren't taught that you have worth. A lot of the time, it encourages this really strict comfort of the self and a really stringent idea of not bending on your own desires and self-love really doesn't encourage communication a lot of the time but instead this encouragement of ignorance of your partner's needs. And kind of like, if your partner doesn't "get it" then that's a bad thing, like there should be some innate natural understanding of love and intimacy. When Love and intimacy is about communication.

There's a lot of media that says that you shouldn't have to train someone, or that teaching someone how to love is a is a Act of training. It's just about communication, and it's a normal and wonderful and beautiful part of learning how to love someone in the ways that they need. And that helps you both in a relationship.

7:58 Without self-love if you're not outright narcissistic and selfish because you are honor your own needs you can swing completely in the other way and be likely to be extremely and highly self-critical and fall into this people-pleasing perfectionism, and basically not really know how to love yourself because you don't think you have worth, and maybe not even love yourself because you don't even think it's important. Those who don't practice self-love and at the same time aren't extremely selfish of their own needs are much more likely to tolerate abuse or other kinds of mistreatment because they weren't taught to love themselves or to know that they have worth, so they put so much pressure on themselves to feel worth because of another person's desire for them. Because there's no healthy sense of self this can also be called codependency where you're extremely dependent on the other person for your sense of self without them what are you you may neglect your own needs and your own feelings in general because you straight up don't value yourself. So self-love is the foundation not only how you treat yourself, and how you treat others but how you allow people to treat you as well. I think a lot of people are aware of that and try and protect themselves by either not being in a relationship or being extremely extremely selfish and just knowing what they want and figuring out what they want and not compromising on that.

So some examples of that in popular media are the Trope of being the main character of your life, so this causes basically this self-centered idea that the world revolves around you and it makes yourself the center of the universe and if you believe in this Trope, this Trope of you being the main character, it might encourage you to to wait for love to come as if it is entitled to you. If you live the way that you want to, then something will fall into your arms because you love yourself and you're just waiting for it. You're like, all right, I'm ready. And this reminds me of a great quote from the good place too, which I'll insert here "soul mates do exist they're not they're made people meet they got a good feeling and then they get to work building a relationship" So that's what it is, putting in the effort to be kind and meeting people getting a good feeling and wanting to put in the work.

And I think because love is so complicated, we want to set standards and landmarks on the performativity of love and this is something that I find really interesting in this day and age the performativity of love and the performance of love and how important that is to a lot of people now so the act of the performance of Love or even self-love by posting about the things you do with your partner or things that you do for yourself can totally be a really healthy and beautiful way to remember the special things you do for yourself and your partner, but it can also be done in vain, which values the performance of those acts and other people's reaction to the performativity of Love by being interested or impressed. Which is something that can become really unhealthy because then it's no longer about intimacy with the people that you're sharing these moments with or that you are doing for yourself for self-care but it instead becomes performative.

And also, I don't think that that's a clear line anyway, like of course you share to impress people, and that's okay! It's all about this balance of it, so that's really nuanced in itself as well. But I think that a lot of negativity can come out of valuing the performance of what you think love should be instead of valuing the moment in the intimacy with that person. For example, we see prom-posals and weddings as commemorative and performative announcement of love, and not saying prom-posals and weddings are inherently negative, but a lot of the time they exist as a performative activity to impress others instead of the other person who they are having this intimate relationship with. Now if you're doing it to share and commemorate and celebrate with others because you're extrovert, and you just love your family and friends and the people around you, then that's okay! But I think as these things become tradition, as weddings become tradition, and proposals become tradition, we also have to question if we want to follow through on that tradition because it's what you and your partner want, or are you following through with something because it's something that's expected of you. Are you using proposals and weddings as a way to prove to others that you are valuable? That you can either ask someone who's really valuable to prom or to marry you and they'll say yes, or you can put on this extravagant party and impress all your family and friends? Why are you performing this act of love and intimacy to others? It's really important to recognize those intentions in your own heart. Like is there this vain aspect of like dating someone cooler or more beautiful, like which works to heighten your own sense of self in comparison to like who you can pull? To truly love is to love and value someone else not use them as a means to find self-love and an outward perception of value for yourself.

We try and recraft moments that we think love represents, like for example, from as little as five years old as two kids getting married on the playground because they want to recreate that kind of love and closeness that they see from their parents. Or when you get a little bit older, two teenagers who are struggling to say "I love you" to each other because you don't really know what that's supposed to feel like, or what that's supposed to look like, and you're not really sure if you found love because your conception of Love is based on your family and friends at that time and the media that you consume like your rom-com films and what you see your friends do in their relationships so how you see other relationships performed. Which isn't always a great way to view love and intimacy and compare your relationship to those. So we can even mimic patterns that we see in our parents or in our friends and how they treat themselves and how they talk to themselves we love through mimicry both how to love ourselves and how to love others or how we were loved.

So, if we know everything from part one, if we understand that it's important to recognize our intentions and not be selfish well then how do we begin to learn how to love? Is it that simple? Well no, nothing is ever that simple. So even though we have this self-awareness, then we need to take it another step in this part two by beginning how to learn how to love if we truly want to enjoy being in love with others or loving ourselves we first need to understand the difference between loving and the desire to be in love and how complicated it is that those two feelings come together and to recognize that this true biological feeling and desire the simple desire to just want to be in love is very very different than loving someone. Because wanting to be in love is Desiring all that positivity that sharing that closeness that intimacy valuing that performance of it versus genuinely loving someone which entails like heartache in this dreaded communication and setbacks and sharing and needing to learn things about yourself in order to work better with a partner needing to compromise.

It's really really difficult and I think a lot can be learned by outlining what is expected from us with love in our cultures in a lot of cultures there exists some Society societal pressure to feel like if we aren't in a relationship by a set amount of years by x amount of years if if we aren't married by x amount of years if we haven't dated this certain amount of people by this certain amount of time, if you haven't dated people before the person who you decide to marry, are you sure? Like a lot of preconceived notions about how love and intimacy should work for every person and there's this unhealthy standard of Partners being meant to be, as if the right people will find each other which is not how it works. And I think that a lot of people just don't really question why there's this widely held belief that there's an age and a limit on when love is and is impossible people even saying like love gets harder to find as you grow older isn't necessarily true but it is still a really valid way to feel.

And this sentiment is shared really similarly to success as well so despite everyone having a different vision and version of success based on their personal needs and health and goals success means something different to every person such as the amount of money you need to make in order to feel successful or to feel taken care of to have a family or to not have a family, to have a career or to have jobs just here and there as you stay at home and parent, to have children or to not have children. Aspirations that change as time goes on, but we feel like we have to have everything together in youth at a really certain age and really really early on, and we don't really question why everyone just tries to do it so in figuring out why we feel that need in a lot of cultures. Why we need to find love and success so young, and have love and success so early in life? Why does it bring a sense of dread when we realize we might not have things as early as we were intended to? And the super fun thing is is that science can help answer this and of course all of these Source notes are on reesegrey.com if you're interested in reading all the Articles yourself :)

So in this first article, their findings indicated that relationships become more exclusive and of longer duration and more emotionally and sexually intimate over the course of adolescence, moreover relationship experiences and Adolescence is associated with an increased likelihood of cohabilitation and marriage in young adulthood. These findings indicate that instead of being trivial or fleeting, adolescent romantic relationships are an integral part of the social scaffolding on which young adult romantic relationships rest. So this particular article encourages people to try and love each other at younger ages because it helps this social scaffolding and figuring out relationships. So because you have a lot of consistent social relationships in youth, with school and clubs and such and that becomes more difficult with work it becomes easier to meet someone to try and build a relationship with in youth because of the consistency in which you're in places a lot of the time, and how often you meet different sorts of people as well. So it's really interesting and encouraging to know that if you try and work at them, [they] don't have to be trivial and fleeting they're always worth something, and loving someone as much as you can or as much as two people want to at any moment means a lot for a personal growth.

And as you learn to love people little by little, you'll figure out your desires and wants and your boundaries. But it's just scary because that involves a lot of vulnerability. Another study on this suggests that marriage itself functions as an actual training ground for these vital relationships, they hypothesize that people increase their levels of self-control and forgiveness over time and practice and that these developments take place simultaneously. So that's actually really hilarious, because you think of marriage as a Finish Line, but it's actually a starting point, and functions as a training ground for the ability to commit to someone and to figure out boundaries. Now of course you do not have to attribute to that practice, you can live a basically like married life with without being married, but this study does suggest that the concept of marriage helps as a training ground with intimacy. So basically, you learn to love by trying to love, and the only way to figure out if you were capable or willing or emotionally able or a lot of different things, figuring out how to reciprocate these factors in love, and figuring out your boundaries is done by attempting to do it.

But people get stuck in in a loop of not feeling ready and thinking you're not in the right place at the right time, and that you shouldn't even consider getting in a relationship if you're not 100 certain that you have enough mental space for this, but the thing is is that you're never a hundred percent ready or certain for love, you're never going to know unless you try, and unless you make yourself vulnerable. A good solution to this is to just remember that you are human. and you're allowed not to know things about yourself, and to experiment and figure things out as long as you do those things in kindness and with good communication, we're allowed to go and try things in a relationship and leave if it doesn't work out. We don't need to plan for the perfect romantic life and any relationship you have it doesn't need to be perfect. Try and get into a relationship with a healthy amount of self-love and the desire to communicate, and love someone else truly how they want in ways that meet your own boundaries, and just see how it goes, and just do your best. If it doesn't work out, you'll have learned some things and most likely things you weren't expecting to learn.

And a lot of the time, I don't think that social media popularly encourages this Behavior either. There's just so much importance on this first love and it makes it even more terrifying to know where to begin because you don't want to waste your first anything. And this carries on later into relationships too, when maybe things aren't working out and people are playing with the idea of of leaving because you've changed so much as people and they get to thinking about these sunk costs and all the work that they put in to grow and change and build a relationship and change a person only to then have that person leave to be in a new relationship where a new person you know quote unquote benefits off of your own work, that work that you did to change that person into a better person. But loving someone and moving on is beautiful, and knowing that your partner has loved people before you should be a comfort and knowing that it is possible for them. And you don't own someone just because you've loved them before. And if the only answer to why do you love that person is I've already invested too much to leave. that's not fair to you or your partner.

So love is definitely more nuanced and and deeper than what we are told especially on social media. And it's sad that it's become a kind of Duty or a rite of passage or a must-have in your life like a job. And it all feels incredibly tiring and exhausting because love is work or is love a work of art? So Eric fromm's book The Art of Loving talks about the subjectivity of love and how it's so scary because it's abstract. And love is defined by those who choose to create and share their time and their ideas and their bodies. And though love is truly possible for everyone, love is not magical, love is only an option, and love is not intuitive because it can be crafted and nurtured by your experiences.

And to quote Eric Fromm directly he says while we're looking at sexual diversity let's remember that we live in a Multicultural Society and that every culture in our world every subculture every ethnic culture has its own ways of creating relationships connecting in Sex and building families, all are valid and valuable. So love is beautiful and subjective and confusing so as long as we're trying our best to love ourselves and others in the most healthy ways that we can, you'll notice that no two relationships are truly the same and check the same boxes. We're all going to go about love a little bit differently than each other, and that's something that should be appreciated and not shot down by opposite side. Love isn't a status quo, but it's become that in hopes of making love a little bit less complicated. But it's just made it a little bit more stressful.

So that kind of brings us to part three romantic love and intimacy. So this video in general, even though this is a pretty far down into the video, it was actually inspired by the book The ethical [ __ ] by dossy Easton and Catherine list. This book is intended for anyone who desires relationships outside of traditional monogamy, and so it's funny because I have like zero interest in that, however I love to read books like about other experiences to figure out what I can get from those. And although the ethical [ __ ] is an amazing title, I think it would have also benefited by just calling the book like how to love. Because everything it talks about has to do with communication in order to have an enriching and fulfilling relationship, and that encapsulates all different forms of relationships. So as a monogamous person, I found the book actually so liberating because in a way, the authors really realize the infinite possibilities that a relationship can offer and honors intimacy and love and communication over anything else. It's really nice to read a book about love that values consent and communication instead of ascribing to a status quo certain way of life to fit in with the culture around you.

So if you're interested this book definitely works to correct certain assumptions about polyamory that people tend to hold, that I even held myself because everyone's boundaries differ and in some relationships a monogamous couple wouldn't even feel comfortable sharing a straw with someone who's not their partner and that would be a limit, and to others that's a silly limit. And to other couples just cuddling with someone else who's not your partner is totally fine, and to other couples that's off limits. And how do you figure that out? By communication. If you work off of selfishness, or if you work off of the status quo, so selfishness may lead you to do things in secret like cuddle others in secret because it's what you want to do, but you kind of think that since it doesn't fit in with the status quo your partner wouldn't like it and so it leads to this unfair dishonesty, and will cause mistrust and later arguments down the line. And then if two people believe that they have to live within the status quo, they may not be able to express themselves more intimately with others because they're too afraid to communicate with each other on their own boundaries. You never know if that's something that your partner may be open to, and is a boundary that they are willing to extend.

So it's all about communicating with your partner and understanding what you need and want and hearing what your partner needs and wants and working based off of those boundaries that you need together. And if there's something that you need in a relationship, such as you need to in order to feel fulfilled cuddle with as many people as you want to and your partner is not okay with that, then you're not a good match for each other. If that's not something that both people are comfortable with. So you really have to figure that out, and the only way to do that is through talk talk talking. And some other couples who draw the boundary at like having a dinner with another person of the opposite sex, and other people just draw the line at their partner having a secret dinner with the opposite sex. So this lack of communication and this lack of straightforwardness is usually what comes into play that constitutes something as cheating. Doing something in secret. Or doing something against what has already been communicated as a boundary. And this is what makes exclusive or monogamous relationships so frustrating to people, because there's no actual rule book about the intricacies of boundaries in relationships.

And the honest truth is that it's all in just talking to your partner and valuing and respecting them, and figuring out things together, and to talk to each other when you feel nervous or jealous or want something to change. Because it's completely normal it's an honoring of your feelings, and your partner's feelings as valid these negative feelings have negative connotations as if if you're feeling negative feelings then you're in a negative relationship, but that's not how it works at all, these things are just normal. It's normal to feel uncomfortable, and I think a lot can be learned by understanding that there's a real distinction between emotional monogamy and sexual monogamy, and knowing that there's a difference in both. Because I think it's a really beautiful ideal to recognize that even monogamous people get this intimate energy from other people and that's a normal and Beautiful Thing, by just having friendships, just by going out to a meal with other people, it can be something that's extremely intimate.

For example, the authors of the book itself they believe that you reading a book that they wrote about intimacy is intimate in itself. The authors actually argue that by reading the book in itself it is an actual sexual experience, which is a little bit wild, and I'm not sure if I would--- it's intimate for sure, for sure. I love these authors it's definitely entertaining and I really do recommend it. And I think a lot of heartache would be saved if we had the same value of friendship and valued that Intimacy in itself, just as much as we value romantic intimacy. And it's really funny because you might learn that what others consider polyamorous is stuff that wouldn't be necessarily outside of the bounds of what you would consider in your own relationship. Like sharing a meal or something.

And these things get even more intricate like there was even a story in the book that a husband had other friends who were women, but would never ever take them to like the same frozen yogurt place that he would always go to with his wife. That those things were intimate, and those things were special to him and there were boundaries within their relationship. These boundaries that they set with each other that they wouldn't know if they didn't communicate. So it's all about that mutual respect, and those intentions. And of course, you can have the Deep friendships and love your family, but I think what makes intimacy and romantic intimacy so difficult and scary is because of the risk. And despite all the work that you put in it might not work out in the end to love intimately and romantically you have to be okay with that. You have to be okay with just experiencing those moments and letting that person go. If it's for the best, and you have to be okay with vulnerability, which is really really difficult because we go in this whole circle because intimacy isn't something that's really honored and talked about in the first place.

But I think culturally things are being put on the right track and we're getting different about how we talk about intimacy, especially with consent to being such a popular topic now which hinges on this understanding of of values of communication. And in the inherent worth of another person, and not being entitled to another person's body under any circumstances. So to conclude this, and and to bring it all home just because I'm like calling out Tiktok or anything doesn't mean that the phenomenon of misrepresenting love and intimacy is anything different to other social media. in Prior years, it's very similar to other harmful ideals that were spread in media. I'm a bit older, and I remember at a time where I seriously I merely let magazine articles, forums, Tumblr Pages, random communities I found--- dictate my relationships and my thoughts on myself and others, and what I thought was acceptable in a relationship, and what was expected in a relationship. Those platforms in general, those cultural platforms of magazines online even in-person communities and families they're a powerful powerful force. The community in which you surround yourself with, or are born in where you get your information from directly correlates to your self-worth and how you treat others and how you let people treat you. It directly correlates to your personal life, and just because there is so much to choose from it can either offer you Freedom or you can be automatically chained to what pops up on your feed, and let it dictate the way you think about your life and that's what makes social media such as Tiktok a little bit more scary and Insidious.

Because it's this constant barrage of words and videos and ideas fed to your algorithm that deeply understands you, and deeply understands what you interact with. It's not working to challenge you or to inform you on healthy ideas, it's feeding you what you you interact with, and what you know, leading you into this this Loop of what you already believe or the things that people in your similar age group already believe. It doesn't care about your mental health, and it doesn't care about ethics or what's right. Your algorithms just don't care, and I think before in previous generations it was more of this like societal pressure and just like what the majority is thinking. How everyone is talking, and at least people are looking at each other in the eyes as they said that, and they would have conversations or hear things one by one. But now it's this constant barrage, and I think it's a little bit more stressful when information is fed to you that way and it can make the whole world seem a certain way, when it's really not. Now you have the ability to be more down this downward spiral completely immersed in your phone alone and growing up as a teen too, I obviously had very low like emotional intelligence. I had to reflect on why those standards had such a deep weight on me, and I I feel like at a younger and younger age you're more expected to confront these feelings. And I just don't think that the young majority of people are equipped to analyze these really deep nuanced concepts of love and intimacy when our culture doesn't even honor teaching healthy love and Intimacy in the first place. Especially when these types of algorithms thrive on outrage content. And I really fear for the lack of intimacy that kids are interested in now, in this movement towards self-love, and not needing anyone else. It's it's really sad.

And despite these these downfalls and these mistakes, and through the pain that we cause others by trying to love incorrectly on accident, and the pain we cause ourselves by not honoring ourselves and thinking that we have Worth, or this selfishness by trying to acquire someone else as a way to reflect a sense of Pride within your social status group. This vain love trap that we can fall into by having extravagant weddings, this Prestige that we want by feeling like we look good with another person in a relationship by pulling someone who is at a higher social class. By just looking like we're in love by just looking like we're happy, just by seeming like we have it all together. To hurt and to make mistakes is to be human. And at its core, I think everyone does their best to love in the ways that they know and the ways that they can and I think think despite trying our best we don't get it right a lot of the time, and that's okay. As long as we're trying, and as long as we're rooting our intentions in kindness.

And I think there's a lot of Hope in the conversations of love and intimacy because we never stopped asking the question on how to love. And everyone is interested in how to love themselves and others in the best way that they can. We're we're looking for answers. And I hope I gave you guys a little bit of resources to try and figure out your own boundaries and to try and love others a little better, to try and love yourself in a way that's a little bit more fair to you today. So thank you so much for adventuring with me today~ And this was this was so much fun, and I hope you guys enjoy your Valentine's Day! Whether that be with someone else, or by just putting on a face mask today and giving yourself a little self-care skin care, or getting yourself something nice to eat. I think I'm gonna go get some salmon sashimi and and pet my cat today as some self-love and self-care. And I love you guys so much, and I'll see you next time! Okay, love you~ bye <3