“iloveitiloveitiloveit” and the frequency men can’t hear

If you are anything like me, iloveitiloveitiloveit hit you like a freight train and you have been listening to it on repeat with the kind of obsessive dedication usually reserved for people going through something. And maybe you are. Maybe we all are. Maybe that’s the whole point.

There’s a specific group of artists I’ve been thinking about lately ,Bella Kay, Gracie Abrams, Lauren Spencer Smith, Lizzie McAlpine and I keep trying to articulate what exactly they do to me. Because it’s not just that the songs are sad. Lots of songs are sad. This is something else. This is me, happily drunk, spiraling in a bathtub full of glitter, completely unbothered about the state I’m in because the state I’m in feels beautifulllllll.

The 2022 Wuthering Heights film , Margot and Jacob Elordi , gives me the exact same feeling. And when I try to explain to men why it’s so moving, I am met with the conversational equivalent of a shrug. “It was fine.” “I didn’t really get it.” And I’m standing there having had a spiritual experience, wondering if we watched the same movie.

We did. We just didn’t receive the same transmission.

So what is that?

Theory one, basically we are trauma bonding as a community and that’s actually iconic. There’s something that happens when a song like this goes viral , it stops being one person’s heartbreak and becomes collective property. We’re all passing it around like a group chat attachment that says tell me you felt this too. Bella Kay made something personal and we collectively decided it was ours. Cathy and Heathcliff have been doing the same thing for centuries , their story keeps getting retold because we keep needing to claim it. That’s not a bug, that’s the feature.

Theory two … it’s the sound itself and for the film, the silence. Acoustic production, raw vocals, minimal arrangements , here’s nowhere to hide in this music. No beat drop to distract you, no production gloss to soften the edge. And in Wuthering Heights, it’s the same principle visually: two people on a moor with nowhere to go and nothing to do but feel. Both Cathy and Heathcliff are essentially screaming into an empty silence, desperate for the other to hear them, and the tragedy is that the silence keeps swallowing the sound. They need each other so completely that it destroys them both. It goes straight to the nerve because it has nothing else to offer except itself. And somehow that’s everything.

Theory three and this is the one I keep coming back to… I think women have a specific capacity to dissolve into other people’s perspectives, to fully inhabit a feeling that isn’t technically theirs, and I think that’s exactly what this music , and this film, asks of you. It’s not passive listening. It’s not passive watching. It’s becoming.

That’s why the men-not-getting-it thing is so telling. Because what Cathy and Heathcliff are doing is not subtle. The longing is enormous, operatic, all-consuming. But to feel it you have to be willing to step inside both of them simultaneously, to hold Cathy’s need and Heathcliff’s need in your body at the same time and let them ache against each other. That’s the whole poetry of the movie. It’s not a love story where one person is right and one is wrong. It’s two people who are each other’s entire world, broadcasting on the same frequency, somehow never quite receiving the signal. And the men I’ve talked to who walked away unmoved BUT  I don’t think they’re unfeeling. I just think they weren’t trained to tune in like that.

I think we are wired , or socialized, or both, to step fully inside another person’s experience and feel around in there like it’s our own living room. Bella Kay does it in four minutes. The 2022 film does it in two hours. Both times I’m wrecked. Both times it feels worth it.

And people like to say this is a weakness. That women are sensitive , prioritize romance too much, feel too much, spiral too easily. But I think the spiraling and the feeling and the bathtub full of glitter is evidence of something that actually takes skill: radical empathy. The ability to hear a stranger sing about loving someone who is gone, or watch two people destroy each other out of need, and immediately, completely, understand it in your body.

Bella Kay didn’t just make a breakup song. Wuthering Heights isn’t just a love story. They’re both frequencies. And a lot of us tuned right in , However some of us just couldn’t hear it. That gap says something… i think

XOXO, P