Dana Colomina

I don’t know how it happened. I somehow managed to develop a deep connection with a nameless narrator. I cannot decide if it’s her curiosity, perseverance, or profound mind that attracts me to her; regardless, consider me charmed. I also cannot tell if I want to be her or be her friend. I think I want to believe that she and I have things in common, though it’s notoriously difficult to accurately judge ourselves. A clear sign of my fascination was when I found myself writing down many thought-provoking questions that she asked herself throughout. I clearly did not want to forget what the nameless narrator had to say. There was one question that I felt particularly gripped to, and fortunately, it kept developing as the plot evolved. The question being: what does it feel like to love someone?

To provide a brief background – the novel I Who Have Never Known Men depicts a dystopian society where forty women are trapped underground. There comes a day when they are freed and must navigate their way back to a stable condition, which, spoiler, does not really happen. At least not in the way most people would classify ‘stability.’ As is life, many of the women eventually die and the 40th prisoner, the nameless girl, is left to fend for herself. 

Earlier in the novel, when all the women are still alive, there is discussion around the older womens’ former partners and children from the real world. The word ‘love’ is thrown around sometimes, but the girl doesn’t have a firm concept of what this could mean. She makes it clear though, time and time again, that she wants to learn everything she can so this concept of so-called ‘love’ sticks with her.

If we fast forward towards the end of the book, the main character is left with one fellow prisoner and friend. When that friend eventually passes away, she revisits the conversation on love and narrates to herself that what she felt towards her friend must be the feeling the other women spoke about all this time. The feeling of wanting to care for someone and prioritize their happiness over your own. The deep care and affection that comes with seeing your soul reflected in another. I find the discovery she undergoes to be beautiful yet chilling because we often just assume that certain feelings feel such an obvious way. But through the human experience analysis that this book explores, I found myself disentangling my own feelings and attempting to determine what exactly certain common feelings feel like. Specifically love.

That brings me back to my burning question: what does it feel like to love someone? If I really sit here and try to break it down… my first thought is that it feels warm and safe. It feels like the cozy sensation you get when curled up on the couch as it’s snowing outside but you’re in a furry blanket watching a movie inside. It feels like the sun hitting your face – just warm enough to bask, yet cool enough to avoid sweating. It feels like unwinding in a hot bath with lights dimmed, candles burning, and slow music playing. 

In a very literal sense, you feel the excitement when someone you love walks into a room, or even nervous energy before engaging. What it really feels like is wanting the person you love to hold you and touch you and never let you go. The safety in being close to them and not feeling strange about making physical contact even when that wasn’t the intention. It almost feels like you magnetize to one another and it takes physical strength to separate. You both observe the touch and choose to stay exactly as you are. Love is the comfort in wanting to be vulnerable with someone because you so deeply trust that they will only love you more for it. The more they see of your soul the closer you both feel. 

When you feel seen, your brain feels understood. That is another unique feeling that comes with love. The one you love is curious about how you think and wants to uncover the meaning of life with you. They want to know the philosophy of being and understand why you are the way you are. They admire you for it. Loving someone means genuinely wanting what is best for them with no feelings of envy for their success. Their successes fill you in a way that surprises you. You want to put the person you love first and make them feel heard and appreciated. It would kill you to see them sad or misunderstood. Love in some ways is a sacrifice of oneself, not only knowing you can and should put someone close to you first, but deeply wanting it so much that it almost becomes selfish; seeing them happy makes you feel happy. Love is something that can be felt with endless relationships in your life, but there are always some that feel most intense, and that’s perhaps why they are so special. 

It is so melancholic to me that the nameless girl in I Who Have Never Known Men found the opportunity to experience love and understand what makes it special. I find it odd that I feel this way since it is a good thing she felt that, really. But I think I feel sad that she felt such a sensation so little in her life that she was able to pinpoint the moment when she thought she finally understood the feeling. While we know conceptually that love is a tender and remarkable feeling, we do sometimes forget how to observe it and nourish it. 

If I were to reframe this, though, how lucky am I to have always distinctly understood the feeling of love. Not to mention, the additional fortune in knowing how many times in my life I’ve thought “in this moment I really feel so strongly for the person across from me.” Those moments where you sit presently and just take the person across from you in and feel ever so grateful. My mind quickly floods with several of these moments in time and it warms yet saddens me, as some is love lost. 

Love is such an interesting and complex feeling, I will always wonder how we are created as beings with the potential to experience such a wild and deeply complicated feeling. This book brought me back down to earth, to the basics of being, and reminded me of the sheer blessing it is to feel so strongly. Whenever I start to take this for granted, the antidote is I Who Have Never Known Men.