WHITING: Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art though Romeo?

Love’s whole world on us doth wheel. Some think it’s beautiful, but I feel otherwise. Love:

L is for lamentable.

O is for ostentatious.

V is for vain.

E is for everywhere (and why?).

I hate love.

My friends often beg me, “Oh Anne! Never give up on love! An Aphrodite like yourself will surely find a dapper man comparable to Michelangelo’s David, and the two of you will rear children who will rule kingdoms with beauty and wisdom!”

But no, I’ve chosen a different path, the one less traveled by. Of course, I once dreamt of Aaron Carter and Leonardo DiCaprio and twisted my apple stem to the alphabet at school lunch to decide there and then, in the cafeteria, who I was going to marry. I admit, I once typed every boy’s name on the grade school class list into the online love calculator. I wrote to Daniel Radcliffe and got no response, composed love poems for no one:

“Oh, you, preppy and cute, with whom I cross paths/

with the vibrant, chiseled face and the perfectly coiffed hair/

I love you, don’t you see me? Save me from Love’s wraths/

For I have never seen such a student so fair…”

But all these efforts were futile, ergo I am forced to conclude that love actually is horrible. My life’s soundtrack is not a melancholic, unchained melody. I do not feel the love tonight. I listen instead to Little Jackie advocate that “The World Should Revolve Around Me.”

Because I, for one, have no interest in the stinging shock of Cupid’s piercing arrow. For Eros is heartless. He takes hostages. He laughs and pretends that shooting people is all fun and games and cute because he’s little and pinkish and the baby of the best looking, constellation-crossed lovers, but his actions are rude and indecent and chock-full of cruel intentions and someone &- like, oh, I don’t know, Hades &- should reprimand him, put him in his place and tell him:

The so-called passions of love are but hellish fires.

I’m tired of being subjected to couples who, dressed to match, whisper sweet nothings in each other’s ears outside Marsh Chapel, showing off their lightheartedness to further prove that the rest of us wander lonely as clouds. I understand &- you’re adorable and picturesque. He’s perfect, you’re perfect, so you’re perfect together and no one can break you apart and you’d die if you were separated for an hour too long because she’s so beautiful and he’s so intelligent and everything else yadda yadda yadda.

Please. Society does not need another Bella Swan.

I am the antithesis of lovesick. I am sick of love. I carry no heart (perhaps I have no heart within me?) and I will forever be without one (for such is my fate, my sweet). I refuse to fall for Jane Austen and Charlotte Bront?’s lies that love conquers all. I have no time for Shakespearian sonnets or E.E. Cummings drivel. I see through the literature: Odysseus was no patron of fidelity &- of course he liked the goddesses &- and Dulcinea del Toboso was never going to fall for Don Quixote.

Indeed, I’m a hopeless romantic, because I find there is no hope in romance.

Thus I request not Amortentia but rather an anti-love potion, one that dehumanizes me &- no, desensitizes me to the venom of love’s bite. Like a sickness, love controls the mind, makes people do stupid things. It brings naught but earthquakes and seismic sufferings that cause perfectly decent females like Juliet and Ophelia to freak out and kill themselves.

It makes queens like Phaedra lust for their stepsons only to have them destroyed by the gods when their adoration goes unrequited. It prompts Paris to think that it’s sensible to run away with Helen and start a war to last for decades. Great love demands too great of sacrifices &- Cleopatra was perfectly fine as a ruler before Marc Anthony came along and got in the way.

Love is a drug and I am proudly above its influence. Of Valentine’s Day candy, I prefer the sour hearts, not the sweet ones. Lovers are but accessories, and to treat them otherwise is to ensure a kaleidoscope of heartbreak that sucks up too much time and energy to ever be healthy or worthwhile. This I promise you &- true joy in life comes from being sensible and heartless. Avoid the poison apple.

You might say I’m just waiting for the sexual revolution to conscript me into its welcoming bosom. Perhaps, deep down, I have a heart unarmored against the right knight errant to come my way. But I refuse to fall. If Cupid knocks on my door at twilight, I will slam it shut.

Love kills &- unless I kill it first.