Alix: Nothing matters but love—or lace

Ten years ago, almost exactly to the day, I found my wedding dress. 

It felt like coming up for air. I only had a couple of weeks in Italy to plan my wedding, before going back to India, and I had tackled decision after decision, watching the budget go up, wrestling against the inescapable feeling that something was just not going to work.

That something, I was sure, was the dress. With only days to find it, I booked a long list of appointments in any wedding boutique I could find in and around my hometown. As I tried on gown after gown, I grew more anxious: nothing felt right. 

I was entirely prey to the myth that I would know the one, when I put it on. I cried, a bride-to-be out of a book of stereotypes, fearing my one chance of wedding gown happiness would elude me.

And then, in the last shop I visited on the last available day—there it was. Behind a dramatic changing room, two rotund middle-aged women with the unmistakable heavy accent of Lombardy’s valleys moved around me like skilled fairy godmothers, using clamps to tighten up the lace bodice while complimenting my protruding clavicles (“love the salt cellars!”), spreading out the silk chiffon while making notes of the adjustments to make.

I conjured up years of dance training, practicing my best posture as I stood on a literal pedestal, and even before they pulled open the theater-like curtain and I could see myself in the mirror—and then in my mother and sister’s teary smiles—I knew. It was the one. 

I, too, teared up a little while the fairies tied a sample veil on my makeshift chignon. I looked the bride part so well, it silenced any doubts that I might not be loved. 

I was 27 and worth my weight in doubt, headed in not-so-slow motion towards the mother of all breakups. Yet for a moment, in that dressing room, I had a wedding and I had a fiancé and I had a perfect dress as irrefutable, silk lace-covered evidence that, no matter how deeply I feared the opposite, I was better than loved: I was lovable. 

Isn’t that, after all, the purpose of romantic love: To be loved by someone that we love, in order to believe the fundamentally unbelievable—that we, too, are worthy of love. 

A decade later, the independent feminist I like to think I am would, of course, tell her younger self, Nice lace my darling, but no pretty neckline or man waiting to marry you on the other side of spring has anything to do with your being lovable, or not. Love, I would make sure to tell her, is so much more than romance—and you have so much of it. 

Then I would leave that twenty-something on her pedestal, and check my phone to see if I matched with someone promising on the latest dating app. 

People often ask me if I haven’t found anyone yet, like I am canned pineapple that’s going expire to expire soon. They ask why am I still single, making sure to emphasize their surprise, which they mean as a compliment. I answer something nice and polite, that makes them feel comfortable, and myself less awkward. 

But the question I hear is, you seem lovable enough, are you not? 

And to that question a part of me wants to reply, with Jo March (and Louisa May Alcott, and Greta Gerwig), that “Women, they have minds, and they have souls as well as just hearts, and they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it. But I’m so lonely.”

I, too, am lonely. Sometimes. 

Italian doesn’t make a difference between being alone, and being lonely—but I love that English does. Because aloneness is easily fixed: You just need people. 

But the remedy for loneliness is harder to come about. It’s love. More specifically: An elusive balance of loving, and being loved. I often suspect trying to attain it might be the purpose of life. 

And so, much to my inner Ms March’s disappointment, I do in fact wonder whether all that we are fit for—not as women, but as humans—is love. Whether minds, and souls, and ambition, and talent, and everything else that’s worth considering, and pursuing, aren’t but love (in its many different forms, for which English only seems to need one word). 

Whether, indeed:

Nothing matters
But love. 

Welcome to Alix. 

🌿 Hibiscus schizopetalus is a plant originally from East Africa. It thrives left unpruned. Photo taken in the Sundarbans Islands in West Bengal, India:

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🎼 Agape, by Nicholas Britell, from the original score of  movie, If Beale Street Could Talk. Agape (ἀγάπη) is one of the several words for "love" in Ancient Greek. It defines selfless, unconditional love of the other. It originates in a religious setting, and is the term used in First Corinthians to describe love. It can be translated as charity.

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💃Nicholas Palmquist, choreography for Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, by Traffic:

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🎨 Bovey Lee, The Moon Holder (detail). Cut paper, 2015-2016:

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✒️ Bashō, On Love and Barley, 152:

Girl cat, so
thin on love
and barley.

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🙏 Behind every woman trying to be successful is a girlfriend frantically checking her emails. In my case, that friend is Sarah Todd. Bunny photograph by Matt Quinn. 

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