love isn’t chill anymore
on grief, style, and mistaking armour for safety
i asked my therapist for feedback on my bumble profile last year. just for a laugh, but unfortunately, my therapist is competent and knows to read into anything i say is “just for a laugh.”
i was an absolute menace on apps, which is why i’ve been in app timeout this year. it’s genuinely shocking none of them have banned me, because i was mostly terrorising innocent strangers with a one-woman comedy routine.
i was incapable of using apps without running a bit. a friend also told me my main profile photo made me look like i was halfway through a bit, which i suppose wasn’t helping, either.
so i’m in my zoom therapy session, scrolling through my profile, and my therapist literally gasped. like, truly seemed stunned, and said:
“you can’t find a husband with a photo like that!!”
and i was like lol, apps aren’t real anyway, it doesn’t matter. it only got worse as i started reading out my prompts and bio, which i thought were hilarious, but she did not find any of it funny.
her final assessment was:
“what’s that species of spider that eats her husband after mating called again? …yeah, that’s the impression you’re creating.”
me, being the emotionally unavailable pest i was, took this as a compliment even though it wasn’t meant as one.
this essay was initially about style, grief, love, and determining if my therapist had a point when she basically informed me i was scaring away the hoes in a patent leather mini dress.
that was until i remembered how, later that night, i asked the group chat for their opinion. firstly, my friends told me that, at my age, i no longer have the luxury of rejecting everyone who wears skinny jeans (rude).
and secondly, basically the entire group chat collectively agreed that i was too old to still be acting this emotionally unavailable.
i’d already perfected the art of dating like a chaotic, emotionally unavailable menace when tahmid was still around. i stopped dating for a year after he died. then, i began ‘dating more intentionally’, which just means i was going on fewer dates but leaving even more men on read.
because every romantic possibility was now an extremely unsexy risk assessment. overnight, my partner criteria went from:
“is he over 6’2 and employed?”
to:
“can this man handle that the central guiding force in my life is and will always be a ghost — a man so pure that many allege he might’ve been a saint?”
as far as i’m aware, hinge is yet to add that category to its filter options.
i’ll admit to some audaciously high dating standards. they’re only considered audacious or high in australia, btw, because the bar is in hell. but i can’t drop it any lower, frankly. i’m far too divorced and hot and financially independent to do so.
however, there’s ‘standards’… and then there’s ‘avoidant tendencies inventing arbitrary self-imposed rules’. if someone asked me out for coffee or gelato, i’d immediately unmatch. how about treating an i-don’t-fuck-anybody-who-can’t-book-a-table rule like a legal requirement? yeah, sounds like princess avoidance is trying to find excuses while wearing a high-maintenance tiara.
but i wish grief was as simple as a “not jealous of my dead brother’s omnipresence” filter.
see, i’m not asking for someone who’s perfect or healed or whole. because nobody is. (and frankly, the healed and whole can be exceptionally boring in bed.)
i’m asking for someone to understand that, two years ago, the universe ripped my life and my heart and my soul open, and nothing feels real anymore.
i lost the one person who made my world make sense. i’ve never felt less safe. i’ve never felt less certain.
when someone can’t handle a calendar, i don’t know how to trust them to handle my heart. not these days. not anymore.
love stopped being simple when tahmid died. someone cute can still give me a flutter in my chest, but the moment they kick into actual possibility, it completely destabilises me.
grief loves to try and convince me that the best days of my life are in the past. because when my present is just hopelessness and mortality, it’s so fucking hard not to think that my future will be, too. because there’s no distinction between my grief and the future.
which is why the possibility of love is destabilising. because it’s not just about hope or love anymore, it’s about continuation. it’s about potentiality.
it’s the possibility that i might have a life beyond grief.
it’s the chance that i might not spend the next 50 or 60 years in one-sided conversations with a grave after all.
it’s the terrifying prospect that there still might be something bigger and greater yet to come. that, maybe, my life didn’t end when the world tahmid and i shared for 31 years did.
love isn’t chill anymore. i used to be like everyone else, finding comfort in the ‘we’ll see what happens’ of it all. now, the same uncertainty that once brought me peace has turned to pain.
love isn’t chill anymore. hope or possibility without clarity or certainty is destabilising. and if hope gets snatched away, it doesn’t feel like a ‘them’ issue like it once did. when possibility turns to dust, it doesn’t just hurt. it feels like someone brewed a custom recipe of cruelty, just for me.
love isn’t chill anymore.
i liked someone, a while ago. it wasn’t long after tahmid died, so it was thrilling to know that all my grief and gloom could even pause for something as light as a flutter in my chest in the first place. like a tiny shard of sun appearing through clouds.
after a few months, there was an actual moment of possibility. in a normal situation, the opening bars of “friday i’m in love” might’ve started playing out of nowhere.
but my brother is dead, and nothing is normal anymore. except that he’s still, somehow, currently embarrassed that his sister just admitted to loving the cure in public.
possibility created stakes. stakes created fear. fear created a desperate need for clarity. a leap of faith without clarity felt incomprehensible. i sensed enough possibility to know my heart was already on the line, but not enough certainty to defeat the grieving risk calculus.
because the entire foundation of my world had changed. my heart was barely hanging on by a thread. risking my heart didn’t just feel dangerous, it felt lethal.
i want to be perceived like i might ruin a man’s day with one witty sentence while blasting “maneater” by nelly furtado. and, to be fair, i could.
yet — simultaneously — i am grieving so deeply, and feeling so fragile that if i have a crush on someone and they say something nice to me, i immediately need to flee home to cry and write in my journal for an hour. or four.
i started this piece with a weak thesis — something something vintage YSL makes me look invulnerable — but i slowly realised my therapist was, perhaps, onto something.
i’m armoured. and it’s got fuck-all to do with eyeliner or leather or leopard print. though, those things really do add to the whole ‘she-wolf concealing a knife in her knee-high stiletto boots’ thing.
see, if anything, my style might be the most honest part about me. perhaps i don’t even dress tough enough. because life forced me survive more bullshit by the time i was five than most woollahra grandmas have in entire lifetimes, but we’re somehow both wearing the same chanel jacket.
because i realised i am the woman who emotionally raised one of the toughest men any of us will ever know, and i did it on my own, when i was only a child myself.
tahmid was the only man i ever felt safe showing my soft underbelly to. he was the only man who truly knew the way my fierceness coexisted with tenderness, the way my strength was born from loyalty and devotion, and how my fire only exists because it comes from truly infinite love.
but tahmid is gone now, and the problem isn’t that i have nowhere to channel that part of myself. the problem is that tahmid was the only man to ever draw it out of me in the first place.
style is just the paint job. the real armour is how tirelessly i work to conceal my warmth.
he was the only man i ever felt safe being my whole self around, meaning i’ve always been a little prickly when it came to romance. because if you had tahmid as your lifelong standard of male courage, empathy, and emotional intelligence, how the fuck would some mediocre lawyer from hinge ever measure up?
(apologies to the many hinge lawyers i’ve dated, i hope none of you are reading this.)
ever since tahmid died, i think i became a puffer fish:
grief, effectively, activated my poisonous puffer fish barbs at any man who dared to approach me.
tahmid was the only man i’ve ever loved without limits, because i knew the only way he would ever leave me is if Allah took him back. i’m fucking terrified of loving anyone else that much. because, unlike tahmid, he’d have the power to wake up one morning and suddenly decide he doesn’t love me anymore.
did you know i used hinge for three years and i never — not once — sent a single ‘like’ to a man? hinge was safe because women just pick from a line-up, so i never had to proactively show interest in anyone.
shout-out to my desert graveyards of men left on read. i’ve never started a single chat on any app. well, except once. only to ask someone if he was standing next to tahmid in a photo. i already knew the answer, btw, because i’d sent tahmid a screenshot first.
but now all my arbitrary dating rules suddenly make sense. refusing to put out unless someone had booked a table. never sending the first text of the day. grief, obviously, led to new — still arbitrary, solely self-imposed — rules altogether.
you know when you try to scream in a dream but can’t? think that, except it’s wanting, very badly, to kiss a hot person and feeling paralysed. you’re basically trapped inside a fortress of restraint soundtracked by the smiths for years, which is a very cinematic way of saying it was meant to protect me from getting hurt.
joke’s on me. turns out sticking to arbitrary rules won’t protect you from shit, because it still hurts like fucking crazy.
maybe worse, because possibility gets frozen in time. you never discover the annoying stuff that makes endings neat or bearable, like if one of you snores or leaves wet towels on the bed. i stuck to a rule and all it got me was a grief-addled, incomplete what-if chapter with morrissey playing on loop.
i often recite this well-rehearsed bit:
“no, it’s fine! i’ve accepted that i might die alone and i’m perfectly okay with that because duh, i can buy all the chanel i want.”
which is — surprise! — a big, fat, giant lie, and i can finally admit that.
because i already have the chanel and the unbearably chic apartment and the ‘au revoir, i’m off to paris for a month or two’ and the lavish oyster and martini afternoons with ocean views. i have a san pelly subscription, ffs. i am untethered enough that if i woke up tomorrow and decided to move to new york, i literally could.
i’m 36 and i haven’t worked for 12+ months. i’m flying to tokyo on sunday, just because my friends will be there, i had a bunch of points, and thought why the fuck not. i’ve manifested the exact life teenage nabila could’ve only dreamt of.
well, better actually. teenage nabila didn’t bank on adding:
“…well, since my divorce seven years ago…”
to casual conversation as frequently as possible, and it truly pays giant dividends from my ‘she’s an enigma with so much lore’ holdings. if my life sounds enviable, it’s because it is.
which is why i can finally admit that it can be really fucking nice, and it can still get pretty fucking lonely.
so, nah — i’m actually not-so-fine with the idea that this is all it might ever be for another 50 or 60 years. because life could still get a little nicer, but life could also get a lot lonelier. i’m tired of pretending i’m okay with that when i’m not, not really.
the only man who ever truly knew me was my brother, tahmid, and now he’s dead. since losing him, if you asked me what i want more than anything, it’s another moment of him alive.
then, if you asked me again, i’d say a vintage cartier tank watch. purely because i’m uncomfortable now and i’d prefer you to stop asking.
but, if you asked again, i might finally be ready to tell you the truth. because what i want more than anything is to be known again.
Vulnerable and more relatable than I’d like to admit. “Do you believe in life after love?” Or whatever Cher said