What I Read And Watch When I Feel Like A Loveless Hagfish

This week, it must be love on the brain.

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Whether Valentine's Day makes you swoon or purse your lips in disdain, you gotta admit there's something nice about having a little holiday cheer plopped into the middle of the week. Daily life can feel so tedious and plain, and Valentine's Day — a holiday where you're not obligated to see your family and brands bend over backwards to sell you heart-shaped treats — is a welcome reprieve from the routine.

This year's Valentine's Day delivered all the fanfare I could've asked for and more. A friend and I watched Titanic in theaters, tears smearing our 3D glasses. At a coffeeshop, I saw an exhausted-looking man hurriedly make a Spotify playlist titled "baby 🌹." I walked by a couple arguing loudly with each other in the street at night. When class ended at the high school near my apartment building, I saw hordes of beaming teens carry their flower bouquets home. All of it was fantastic.

Today's reSEARCH is dedicated to all the joy and carnage that comes with a holiday dedicated to love. Hope you enjoy it.

an oil painting titled "a man trying to embrace a woman"

Revisiting

The 2016 Vice Guide to Cuffing. "Cuffing season is all about throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. Except the shit is sloppy DMs at 2 AM, and the wall is literally anybody you're friends with on social media. ... Jesus is this how we live now?" Hannah Ewens and Emma Garland ask. "In sex cycles? Forever? Cuffing and fucking and fucking and cuffing?"

Obsessing

"Feeling Unsatisfied? Blame ‘Romantic Consumerism,’ Says Esther Perel." In her interview with the Cut, relationship expert and couples therapist Esther Perel blows my mind with every sentence she speaks: "I always make the distinction between love stories and life stories. There’s many more people you can love than people you can have a life with. There are a lot of people you can meet on a beautiful trip — you come from different worlds, but you have a moment of connection in a particular place. Beautiful, but those are love stories. Just don’t try to turn every love story into a life story."

View this video on YouTube

YouTube

Streaming

“Cellophane” by FKA Twigs. Unlike other breakup songs, which often run the gamut of anger to neediness to self-empowering scorn, “Cellophane” is dominated by the singular feeling of emptiness. In “Cellophane,” loss is a bottomless pit, a descent that ends with not passion, but numbing resignation. (“When you’re gone, I have no one to tell”??? Has someone written a lonelier sentence????)

Nothing lasts forever, even misery, and Twigs has since moved on to making sexier, more dressed-up music. Still, “Cellophane” persists as an elegy to a love gone wrong — and an archive of the grief that came before the healing.

Wow, you read the whole thing! Thanks for that. If you have a favorite corner of the internet that you’d like to share, send it my way at hellomobile@buzzfeed.com with the subject line “reSEARCH.” We may feature it in a future newsletter.

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