My Afterglow Moment: What “The Book of Love” Taught Me About Growing Up

I have not had an easy transition to adulthood. However, through the Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love,” I have been able to reckon with my growing pains. 

Written by Zachary Bolash

Illustrated by Audrey Buckley

Recently, I stumbled across an old playlist of mine entitled “Thrust”; it features the UT tower painted a shade of burnt orange that you would see in the Appalachian’s Fame Azaleas, with the window panels lit to spell out “27.” The first song on this playlist is “The Book of Love” by The Magnetic Fields. Despite this playlist’s suggestive name, it is far from it. In fact, this playlist is the diametric opposite of any sultry feeling. “Thrust” describes the intense, painfully inert process of growing up, of literally being thrust into a new, scary adult world.

My transition to adulthood was unexpected; I found myself peering over the bridge of life and discovered beneath me the deep, dark ravine of adulthood. This moment occurred on the eve of my college move-in.

I came out to my parents when we were loading a cumbersome mattress into the body of a U-Haul. They were frustrated. Not because I was gay, but because, when I broke this news, both of them were baking in the sun while hauling a pudgy, deadweight mound onto the landing. They were supportive but inquired why I had not broken this news earlier. I simply said that I didn’t know. 

Really, I did know. Coming out entailed letting adult love in; no longer was love inhibited by the fact that I was not out to my parents. Love suddenly conquered a sizable territory in my life, specifically the part of my life that was at home, with my parents. Love followed me everywhere now, even at home. 

Later that night, appropriate to the occasion, I found “The Book of Love.” My first listen was paralyzing. It struck at every synapse, the sound of what you have been searching for a long time and have finally found.

The reverberated guitar strings and deep alto of the frontman, Stephin Merritt, equally soothed as they troubled. From the first lines, “The book of love is long and boring / No one can lift the damn thing / It’s full of charts and facts and figures,” an ominous feeling is offset by Merritt’s paternal timbre, akin to tough love talk from a parent — the feeling that the road ahead is arduous, a “long and boring” journey, but a journey worthwhile nonetheless.

I began my first semester of freshman year a nervous wreck. If you knew me then, you would have found me eviscerating an açai bowl from Shake Smart, scanning readings for an acutely painful government class designed for an honors program I did not qualify for. I was anxious but stable.

However, on one of these evenings, I received a phone call from my mother, whom I could hardly understand as she was sobbing until she stated, “Coco is dying.” Apparently, a long seizure event overtook my otherwise healthy family dog. The next one and a half hours consisted of me riding in an Uber to haul me to my hometown’s pet clinic to meet my despondent parents.

It was a long 3-hour waiting period, soundtracked by the clinic’s mini fridge’s whirring and the static TV’s “Friends” reruns. I found it strange that despite my dog’s past health, she was now being whisked away from me by a sudden neurodegenerative ailment. The fact was so cosmically painful that it made me reflect on the viability of my love for her. Whether the time we spent making gourmet dog food, ensuring she wasn't leaning too hard on her bad hip, as well as letting her sleep on the bed with us, was worth it.

When I was revisiting old songs, specifically “The Book of Love,” I realized that it was. It was the saucy vocals of Merritt and those reverberated guitar strings that reminded me of love’s labor, specifically in the lines, “But I love it when you read to me / And you, you could read me anything.” These lines are delivered with such exceptional melancholy that they reminded me of the loving liturgy we performed for my pet. We had given her everything and had obviously won nothing material. In fact, the love spent probably could finance a mortgage.

However, “The Book of Love” taught me that my perception of love was a reductive way of viewing the concept. Love in itself is supposed to change you for the sake of the other person. Through the years we spent with Coco, ‘reading’ her passages from “The Book of Love” through gourmet dog meals and bespoke training classes — I knew that Coco had changed me, and those around me, to be kinder, patient, and more importantly, receptive and willing to give love despite everything.

Coco actually pulled through in what the veterinarians called a ‘miracle case’: Her seizures stabilized. She lives, as happy as she can be, with the ailment alongside a pill regimen reminiscent of the Spongebob clip where Pearl gives Mr. Krabs ‘his pill.’ However, I still know, by way of Merritt, that the lessons imparted in that clinic room still hold more pertinent than ever.

Aside from a turbulent freshman year that included an awkward coming-out and an (almost) dead dog, I found myself settling into college life and my sexuality. I started dating, and I discovered an interesting quirk about myself: I'm not very good at dating. I was helplessly uncool. I would drop an SAT word mid-sentence, ramble about something esoteric, shift eye contact, or mumble nothingburgers in awkward silences; sometimes, all of the above.

However, one evening, I met a boy like myself, whom I found endearing in his many faux pas. For instance, once he forgot to hold the door open and then apologized for not doing so — without me complaining — and made me walk out of the restaurant to open it again. We liked the same music by the same people. He knew the difference between No Wave and New Wave; he got my Ross Perot Joke and knew what I meant by ‘perchance.’

I thought this was a come-to-Jesus moment in the gospel of “The Book of Love.” I was letting love in despite the many hardships of before — I had deciphered a formula for “its facts and formulas” and found its “ancient” graphs legible. Merritt’s voice stopped being isolating and veering on creepy, but ruggedly optimistic when he would exclaim that “The book of love has music in it / In fact, that’s where music comes from.”

Eventually, he invited me over one evening, and I left  Googling “how to gently end things with someone.” Without divulging too much, I will say that the experience left me deeply heartbroken and feeling the entire spectrum of shame and sadness all at once. Austin was cloaked in a wintry darkness that made the city’s neon landscape more lurid than ever when I called my Uber. As the buildings swished by in the traveling minivan, “The Book of Love” popped into my head again, and I reflexively played it.

The warmth of the song was replaced by a chill like the one in my backyard. It moved me to tears in one of the last verses of the song, where Merritt’s vocal gusto ebbs for a much more airy vocal delivery. In an emotive state between hope and absolute despair, Merritt pronounces that The Book of Love “[is] full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes / And things we’re all too young to know.” 

My immense heartbreak made me realize that I was approaching love in a diagnostic manner. Something to formalize and create a set of rules for. What is funny about love, however, is that it abides by no rule. It is a feeling that exempts from all opportune coming-out times and better pill regiments  forces us to reckon with its deeply personal, irrational nature. There are no “facts and figures” with love, just unadulterated human emotion.

I have since healed from this experience. I took a sabbatical from dating, rediscovered a buried love for reading (not just The Book of Love) and reconnected with my epileptic dog. My undergraduate journey has been challenging, sometimes painful, but from these experiences, I have learned more about  love and how to embrace its cruelty with brevity. To quote the gospel, I have reckoned with “The Book of Love”’s “weight,” its confusing and esoteric “facts and figures,” and have reckoned that it is okay to be “too young to know.”

So, my advice to you is thus: Take a page out of the “Book of Love.”