Violent Desire: party4u, The Great Gatsby, and (the) Green Light

to be seen is to be loved, so watch me party on u

“If you marry someone else, I’ll send her death threats on Facebook.”

I once said this to my ex-boyfriend. In my defense, he refused to believe I really loved him.

“I don’t believe it, I can’t believe you actually want to date me.”

“Really? You really like me? I feel like I’m being pranked, or that this is a joke.”

Even when I initially asked to kiss him, bravely making the first move, he covered his face and murmured, “Really? Me? You want to kiss me?”

I felt that gutting fear of being left every time he said this stuff. Abandonment issues who? I was paranoid constantly that if I couldn’t sufficiently convince him of my feelings — he’d leave.

But his insecure sentiments became an emotionally manipulative psyop: what came off as sincere uncertainty of his loveability was actually a mechanism to ensure I was constantly overstating my undying love, affection, and desire for him. I was so worried I might lose him, that I overcompensated for how I really felt.

Before we began our five-month long relationship — the toxicity of which has surely killed off more turtles than any plastic bag heap — he had already dumped me once before. It was out of the blue, and for another woman.

After break up #1, I was at Denny’s on December 30th with my friend Daniel after a night of clubbing. We both made 4 am-almost-new-years-wishes.

My wish on this fateful December evening, in 2021?

“I wish that he would come back to me,” I said, cradling my mug of black coffee for extra warmth. We were seated underneath the air conditioning vent which was oddly powered up in the dead of night (or is it very early morning? 4 AM is sort of non-binary timewise) in December.

“Really?” Daniel balked. “You get one wish and that’s what your’e asking for? You’re wasting your wish.”

To this day, I do not know if Daniel meant that I was wasting the wish because it would never come true, or because it was a stupid fucking thing to wish for — even if it did come true.

Either way, it did come true. Very true. In May of 2022, my ex dumped the girl he had dumped me for. We got back together. Before that — between December of 2021 and May of 2022 — we did not speak at all, despite the fact that as he was breaking up with me he had said, “I always want you to be in my life. You’ve taught me so much and I want to be friends.”

I texted him two weeks post-break #1 up to go on a hike, and he said “now isn’t a good time.” As he would explain to me six months later, he felt that there was no way he could be in the same space as me without “something happening.” So instead of telling me that he just blew me off. And posted a TikTok with his new girlfriend at the exact same hiking trail I had invited him to trek together. Cool.

I spent that winter break my junior year at UCLA wrying (walk-crying) to the furthest dispensary I could manage to get to on foot, just to distract myself from the break up. I watched my daily mileage go up everyday, from six miles to ten to twelve. Once my legs began to give out, I’d buy my pre-rolls, smoke on my way home; there, I would collapse into bed, letting pained sleep overtake me to the lullabies of Adrianne Lanker’s Songs and Instrumentals, like a child suffering her first fever.

In the ensuing months, I stayed obsessed with him. I didn’t know about no contact, or self-respect for that matter apparently, because I continued to watch his every move on social media. Jay Gatsby may have had a green light, but I had a blue light. I yearned into my screen. I masturbated to old photos and videos of him online. Sometimes I became so overwhelmed with the grief of having lost this ideal person who I thought was my once-in-a-lifetime-soulmate. I would cry, then become turned on by my own misery, by the passionate drama of it. I would masturbate again.

My feelings about him were clearly, clearly unhealthy. Not only is this a textbook version of the worst way to handle a break up, but he and I had gone out for approximately a month before committing to something official, which lasted all of two days before he bait-and-switched to another woman.

How well could I have known someone after a month of casual dating? Why was I so attached to someone who dumped me after just two days? Why did I project the idea of soulmate-ship and marriage onto someone who was ignoring me?

The longer I stared at the blue light, the brighter it grew, and the darker the rest of my room seemed in comparison to the glowing ongoings of his digital life. His avatar’s world became a bright dot of failed hope, against which the rest of my life darkened.

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When we met up for the first time post-break up in May 2022, I was feral. I used an old hooker’s trick: I rubbed my vaginal fluid onto the sides of my neck like perfume. The pheromones are powerful attracters. I know my squeamish readers are horrified right now. But I was desperate to hook, line, and sink this man. If he was king salmon, I would have worn a choker of minnows.

At first, we didn’t speak of the break up. We were just hanging out “as friends.” Then at one point he half-playfully, half-seriously asked if he had “traumatized” me with the sudden break up and ghost. I don’t recall much of this afternoon; it feels so long ago. I do remember being confronted again at his house, this time more seriously, to which I began to stutter out some of the pain I felt in December, the sorrowful longing that lingered until the dawn-break of Spring. I think at one point I said I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

Because he then “playfully” sprayed my legs with some Febreeze, to get me to divulge. In my manic hypochondriac anxiety about whether or not this would give me chemical burns, I told him through crazed laughter and declamatory tones of the pain he had indeed put me through.

Somehow, we ended up in his bed jacking off together to “Sunset” by Caroline Polachek. Within two weeks we were official, and in less than a month after this encounter, we said I love you and I lost my heterosexual virginity at 22 to him.

The rest of our relationship was a similar clusterfuck of tears, anger, mania, resentment, anxiety, attachment style glitching that would give any TikTok therapist at least a year’s worth of content.

That was 2022. From 2023 until now, we’ve been no-contact. I don’t harbor any ill will toward him. I was truly insane in the relationship; he put up with an amount of crying and emotional outbursts that I think even a preschool teacher would quit over.

To be fair to myself, I was rightfully constantly paranoid that he would leave me again for the same woman as before — or worse — a different woman, such that the entire world was now a threat.

It did not help that he constantly played with my lizard brain need for him by refusing to believe I really liked him. Sometimes, this would come in the form of saying things like “I don’t believe you really love/like me.”

He tricked me into begging for something so much that I didn’t have time to think if I even really wanted it in the first place.

Basic reverse psychology. I know, I’m an idiot. But we were all 22 once, right?

Other times, I would say something like, “If we move in together…” to which he would reply with puppy eyes and a frown, egging me on to say “Okay, okay — when we move in together,” which satisfied him. I think just a week or two after one such conversation he dumped me — saying he couldn’t picture himself getting married or staying in a relationship for longer than eight months or so.

So yeah, I told him that if he married someone else, I would send her death threats on Facebook. I was terrified he’d leave again. If the gap between keeping him or losing him was securing his belief in my undying affection for him, then I would bring dying into it for good measure. (In case any psych ward people are reading this, to be clear again, I only made the threat to be melodramatic and prove a point and would never actually send someone death threats on Facebook. I’d do it on TikTok if anything cmon now).

A common woman’s lament: I was crazy, but it was because he made me crazy.

What I think about today is the kind of misplaced desire, the infatuation that bordered on obsession, violence, fear: that dangerous mythologization of a love interest. When a person becomes so fantastical, perfect, beatific in your mind that they become a mythological figure.

My ex recently got engaged to a mutual acquaintance. I haven’t thought about our break up since 2023; we failed at an attempt to become friends after break up #2; I graduated university; and then I moved to Southern Europe for a year and a half on a fellowship. Instantly, the largeness of the world inverted the largesse of him in my mind, the way a big rat is revealed to actually be a very small rodent when placed upon the back of a Great Dane.

The small light I once gazed upon in the darkness of my room now looked like a lit candle on a sunny day. That light of who he was to me became unnoticeable among the grandiosity of an aurora.

However, his engagement made me think back to this period of my life. I’m thinking about obsessive desire, limerence, or loving the idea of someone more than the person themselves. About the kind of dynamic which drives a person, even melodramatically and under duress, to make a promise of a death threat.

I see my experience in a popular internet pop-intellectual phenomena: the comparison between “Green Light” by Lorde, “party 4 u” by Charli XCX, and The Great Gatsby. There are a lot of memes about how these songs are pop musical renderings of the story of Jay Gatsby’s fixation on and obsession with Daisy Buchanan, to the point that he throws lavish parties to get her attention and stares longingly at a symbolic green light.

a comment on the youtube video for “party 4 u”...i too luv cheese

iN tHiS eSsAY i WilL — 1) talk about this internet phenomenon as a means of 2) unraveling this theme of violent desire, romantic objectification, 3) so as to write comparatively about these works of media in a meaningful way since they’re being compared already in the popular sphere, and 4) finally put to bed and understand exactly what the fuck happened between my ex and I.

Ultimately, I argue that these works are about the violent/desperate desire which arises from romantic objectification, wherein one partner gazes upon the other as a romantic idea rather than a real person, and how this comes from, I believe, a once-in-a-lifetime feeling of being seen for real.

In case you would like to skip around or are curious about the structure of this piece:

Section 1…..The Superficial Gaze in The Great Gatsby

Section 2….The Mythology of Feeling Seen

Section 3…Romantic Objectification and Chimeras: party 4 who?

Section 4…Superficial Longing and “Cruel Optimism”: Green Light and the green light

Section 1…The Superficial Gaze in The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby, party4u, and Green Light are not about true love.

They’re closer to what Romeo and Juliet was about — the kind of infatuation, obsession, misplaced desire, objectification of a love interest which can culminate in anger, martyrdom, or violence. Civil hands awash with civil blood.

I experienced this type of “love” with my ex. It was more of a superficial obsession, limerence, one might say. I romantically objectified my ex as My Person without really thinking about it or seeing what was really between us. It was all gaze, all image, all projection.

In The Great Gatsby, there is a double gaze of this kind. Nick Carraway watches Jay Gatsby watch Daisy Buchanan. Other academics have already written about the homoerotic nature of Nick’s writing of Gatsby, which begins with this description: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away” (2).

There’s layers of yearning and watching and obsession — after all, the narrator names his book for Gatsby, who is obsessed with Daisy. It is notable that F. Scott Fitzgerald chose to narrate the book through someone else in the plot, rather than Gatsby’s first person or through a more omniscient narrator. He chose someone planted firmly in the world of West & East Egg. That’s because the kind of love that The Great Gatsby is about, is really a desire of gaze. It’s more about yearning for the ideal of a certain person rather than true love.

Nick’s gaze of Tom Buchanan, Jordan Baker, Daisy, as well as Jay Gatsby is profoundly intimate. He describes these characters, respectively:

“Not even the effeminate swank of [Tom’s] riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body…It was a body of enormous leverage—a cruel body” (7).

Of Daisy, he writes, “[she] began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again” (9).

Upon encountering Jordan Baker, he writes, “I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet” (11).

As for Gatsby, Nick writes an entire paragraph about his smile, beginning with: “It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life” (48).

However, this is the closest we can get to the other characters, since there is no narrator who can tell us what each person is actually thinking or feeling. They are objects of his experiential gaze. In choosing a narrator who is also a character, Fitzgerald forgoes the 19th-century literary practice of free indirect speech. Free indirect speech is when a third-person narrator relays the innermost thoughts of a character. The reader gets to go inside the mind of multiple characters.

The legibility of the characters is all external, which emphasizes how the desperation and passion felt by everyone in The Great Gatsby is a product of something superficial. We only get to know these people through seeing them, through the peering eyes of Nick. We gaze through his gazing. There is no knowledge of anyone’s interiority, just what we can observe from the outside.

This literary environment mirrors the real world, one wherein projection and objectification based on superficial perceptions create entire narratives and mythologies. Any high school English teacher will include something in the Gatsby unit about Nick being an unreliable narrator. For those who, like Nick, possess only a gaze of a situation, who fall under the spell of an image of a person, they may be their own unreliable narrators.

Section 2…The Mythology of Feeling Seen

When I wrote that mythology in my head about my ex and I, about every random detail early on in our relationship being some sort of forebear to a lasting marriage, I was my own Nick Carraway. I was the unreliable narrator of my own life, blinded by an exterior I could not see past or know beyond.

This superficiality is not just about wealth or status. Certainly, the criticism of that type of hedonism is part of what Fitzgerald set out to do. However, much of the superficial view of people in the novel is also based upon seemingly deep qualities — a person’s voice, smile, behaviors.

However, these are still highly external; they are a facade. A person can project a lot onto someone with a certain charisma or charm, as I did with my ex. In our particular case, I relate to Nick’s instant infatuation with Gatsby’s smile, as my ex’s presence, conversation, and company made you feel so eternally reassured, so seen, so perfectly perceived.

In what Nick saw in Gatsby, I saw in my ex. Despite all the bad things I can say about our relationship, — I will give him this: he made you feel so fucking seen. The Great Gatsby title makes sense because there is a certain sense of greatness people who are hugely charismatic, good at listening, and profoundly perceptive and warm have. Nick continues to write of Gatsby’s smile:

“It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey” (48).

When Nick wrote that Gatsby had a smile you’d only encounter four or five times in life, I know what he meant. After my ex and I broke up, I worried it would be years until I found another person who was as social-emotionally fulfilling as my ex.

In the 1970s, the developmental psychologist Edward Tronick conducted the Still Face Experiment. Hundreds of mothers held their infants, speaking and playing with them as usual. Then, they were supposed to suddenly stop responding to the baby. No matter what the babies do, they are met with the same unaffected stare, with zero indication that their caretaker is seeing them. Quickly, the babies panic. Every single baby erupted into a tantrum over not being seen.

Oftentimes, the entire world feels like a mother whose expression has fallen flat in the face of my cries — whether they be of pain or joy. I feel so deeply unseen at times; all I really want from a romantic partner is someone who not only sees my smile or my tears, but smiles or cries in return. I crave, too, someone whose self-expression is as clear and answerable as the face of a child. Instead, dating oftentimes feels like I’m bawling or laughing maniacally to a disaffected stare. My ex had this uniquely powerful smile Fitzgerald described.

The problem is, it’s a facade. Like Nick, I projected a certain greatness and grandiosity onto this smile. I don’t know if it’s just charisma, charm, perhaps some form of emotional manipulation, a mask that can be taken off — but whatever it is, it is just as superficial as any other physical trait, like hair or shoes.

I fell really hard for the facade. And I would have done anything to get it. Put genital fluid on my neck, shower Febreeze off my legs, beg a person to believe me — and even yes, throw a party. In our interim period, when my ex and I were trying to be friends again for round #2, I had a birthday party. While I did not throw it for him, I threw it with him in mind.

I invited him, hoping he’d make it and see me with (cue Janis Ian voice) all my awesome friends at this awesome party and think to himself: “Wow, she’s actually a catch.”

According to Jordan Baker, Gatsby bought his house in West Egg, across from Daisy’s East Egg home, “so that Daisy would be just across the bay” (78). Jordan tells Nick that Gatsby “wants to know…if you’ll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over” (78).

Nick is the voice of reason, and writes in what I read in an incredulous tone, “He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden” (78).

I dispensed weed and Doritos to Sociology majors for my 23rd birthday. In between taking photos and blowing out candles on picnic blankets, I continuously scanned my phone to see if my ex would come last minute. In the end, he did not come to my party.

Jordan adds that Gatsby only throws his parties because he “half expected [Daisy] to wander into one…but she never did” (79).

Which brings us to “party 4 u” by Charli XCX. This song has often been compared to The Great Gatsby as half-meme, half real lyrical analysis.

I think there is something there. The song has a certain manic-desperate tone that only comes from violent, obsessive desire or superficial, toxic longing. It’s a song about trying to get someone who doesn’t want you, through a lavish display of attention-seeking, likely because you’ve created a fantasy of who they are in your mind that isn’t real.

This kind of Gatsby-like behavior is all around us. Users post to Instagram in the hopes that their crush will see it, like the post enough to like them back.

“They liked my post!” becomes “They like me!”

Urban Dictionary literally calls this behavior “Gatsbying”: “Posting to social media and then waiting for that one specific person to check it out. The modern day equivalent of Gatsby throwing elaborate parties seeking Daisy’s attention.”

If you’re doing something like this, there’s a chance you’re already in the wrong. If they were really Your Person, you wouldn’t need to lure them in with a hot selfie or DJ booth. More importantly, if you’re putting on the soiree of the century to get someone, how can you know that what you’re doing isn’t rooted in some superficial obsession, some image you have of what this person is, all the while bulldozing past who they really are?

The Great Gatsby is timeless in its portrayal of people desperate for the wrong person, and the lengths we’ll go to get the object of our unhinged romantic desire.

Section 3…We talk a lot about sexual objectification, but not enough about romantic objectification; who is this party 4?

If someone is sexually objectified, this means that they are seen as an unanimated physical object solely for sexual use; their interiority becomes irrelevant, and their only worth becomes their fuckability.

A romantic object on the other hand, is when a person becomes an objectified project of what the other person wants romatically. Have you ever projected a grand romantic narrative onto someone? Have you ever imagined they have ideal qualities? Known someone less than a month but declared them your soulmate? Put someone in a box of The One after just a good first date? Concocted a fantasy in your head of what would happen next, only to find yourself disappointed when they didn’t fall in line?

This is all romantic objectification. When you imagine someone is something they are not, over inflate your shared reality, over-imagine who they are, and project an image of the type of relationship/life you want onto someone who does not want that. When you try to truncate who a person is or shoehorn them into some daydream you have. You ignore who they really are, and turn them into a Romantic Object.

More recently, I dated someone who romantically objectified me. She wanted the type of relationship where she was the caring homemaker and I a stoic, doting recipient of her martyr-like efforts. It was also clear she wanted some sort of Billie Eillish soft butch girlfriend, and so she was constantly discouraging any expression of femininity I had. I only existed within the context of her fantastical projections.

It felt like some script or fantasy was playing in the background of our interactions in her head, and when I didn’t say my line or step into my role, she became crestfallen. Rather than seeing me for who I really was and what I really wanted, she tried to force a type of relationship, onto a projection of me. I was a romantic object.

I did the same thing to my ex. It’s always the people who you project onto the hardest that create the biggest heartbreak. Perhaps because, not only did I lose him, I was losing the entire idea of he was and who we were I had in my head.

He once told me about his distrust and doubt of my feelings for him, amid a conversation about how many people he encounters who quickly fall in love with him and crave exclusivity about three dates in.

“I just feel like, how can people like me when they don’t even really know me?”

In a snap, I replied: “I do know you.”

How could I have been so hubristic? I don’t know. I was 22. I was in love for the first time, or so I thought. But I should have paused when my ex said that, because he was right. He was right to doubt people could actually like him when they didn’t even know him. I certainly didn’t; instead I projected an image of who I thought he was, what I thought I knew onto him. He wasn’t a random guy; to be sure, he was a close enough approximation to the image in my head.

Nevertheless, the person I thought I loved was a figment of my imagination. Anytime he stepped outside of the romantic box I had placed him in, for better or for worse, it would create discord in our relationship. I either ignored these traits of his or came into direct clash with them.

We’ve all been there — you’re only on date two or three with someone who suddenly gets very clingy, obsessive, starts to trauma dump, and delivers a pre-scripted speech about how they feel like “this is going somewhere,” when you two in fact barely know each other. This has happened to me a few times, and every time it’s acutely clear that this person is probably just lonely and wants a relationship but not a relationship with me. So, they find someone who is as close to the thing they want in their head, pair it with a mythology they’ve created about you, and try to make a relationship happen. To quote my ex, “How can people like me when they don’t even really know me?”

I’ll give an example that puts him in a more positive light. There is a part of me that’s bitchy, cold, judgmental, close off, guarded. He, for instance, told me that he wanted to go to all of my stand-up comedy shows and be a “really supportive partner.” I shuddered at the thought, and even though I didn’t perform for most of our relationship, if I had, I would have never invited him. The thought of potentially bombing in front of a romantic partner makes me want to move to Arkansas and change my name to Evelyn. It seems like he attends all the shows of his new partner.

He also “loved conflict” and fantasized about having a really serious, emotionally heavy, tear-filled disagreement or argument only to make up and then have really profound, close sex. The thought of having sex adjacent to any kind of conflict makes me want to buy colored contacts and move to Alaska.

I need someone who can hear me say “that baby looks busted” and not think of me as twisted. He could not do this. Instead, we talked endlessly about the toxic feedback loop wherein he judged me for being judgmental, turning him into the kind of judgmental person he hypocritically purports to dislike.

I didn’t see him for who he really was, and any time he existed outside of the framed image I had of him, I’d vigorously wipe it away with emotional Clorox.

But everyday, he was just close enough to this image. He possessed unique qualities I hadn’t found in anyone else — namely, that eternally reassuring smile and sense of being seen he offered. I ran with those. To my credit, he was also deeply manipulative and disingenuous, which made it harder to see the traits of his I maybe didn’t like.

He also liked to shroud his push-pull expressions of commitment and then avoidance by saying he’s a “people pleaser,” a form of therapy speak which allows people to sympathetically get away with duplicitous affection for the sake of personal validation or martyr-like behavior in order to obtain valorization.

The speaker in “party 4 u” reflects romantic objectification, whereby instead of really seeing someone, a person does a lot of stuff to win them over to get an image they have, like a romantic prize. She sings: “I only threw this party for you, for you / Birthday cake in august, but your birthday’s 19th of June.”

At a first glance, this detail seems positive. Birthday cake when it’s not your birthday seems like the most lavish, munificent thing a person can serve at the party for you. Only, it misses the mark. There’s a reason for that “but.” If the singer understood who their object of affection really is, they wouldn’t have a birthday cake for them on a random day in August.

The cake is really for the speaker to get attention, to get her romantic object. It’s equivalent to Gatsby throwing lavish parties, when really all Daisy probably wants is a husband who won’t cheat on her. Birthday cake in August for someone who’s birthday is months early misses the mark. It’s a desperate grab for winning affection. It’s over the top. It’s off.

The verse continues this way (0:48-1:15):

One thousand pink balloons
Dj with your favorite tunes
Birthday cake in August
But you were born nineteenth of June

Champagne pourin' in your mouth
Called your friends from out of town
Got the party bag with the purple pills
And I'm waiting for you by the window, yeah

Called your digits, but the phone kept ringin'
Wish I knew what you were thinking
Na-na, na, one thousand pink balloons
Dancin' on to your favorite tunes
Hope you walk in the party
'Cause I threw the party just for you, like oh

The wild opulence of the party described here is more of the same. It’s the singer saying, “Look at all of this stuff I did for you, why won’t you answer my calls?” This is the behavior of someone lusting after a chimera, an idea of a person, meanwhile ignoring the real interiority of the person they’ve made the party for. She even notes that she has the birthday wrong, but it doesn’t matter. It’s about the idea of this person coming to party with her, watch her party on them. It’s all gaze.

It’s important to note that in all these scenarios, no one asked for the party, the Instagram post, the big gift or show of affection.

The song’s titular line, “I only threw this party for you” becomes whiny, bitter, entitled. It comes across as “I did all of this for you, why won’t you date me now!?” rather than, “I love you so I did this for you.”

Listening to the verse, you can hear the longing now. But it’s not longing for a true love. It’s longing for someone the speaker feels entitled to. It’s longing for a romantic object. It’s Gatsby holding his arms out desperately to the green light, yearning for something that doesn’t exist. His image of Daisy was just that, a superficial figment of his imagination. Nick’s image of Gatsby too was a kind of chimera. (1:15-1:35)

I only threw this party for you
Only threw this party for you, for you, for you
I was hopin' you would come through
I was hopin' you would come through, it's true, it's true
Only threw this party for you
I only threw this party for you, for you, for you
I'm about to party on you
Watch me, watch me party on you, yeah

What is the “for” doing in “party for you”?

“For” has multiple prepositional meetings.

There is “for” as in “I made this sandwich for you.” Literally, the thing you do is for the other person or subject. This “for” is generous.

In theory, that’s the type of for the singer is using when she sings, “I only threw this party for you, for you. Only threw this party for you.”

“I trained hard for this medal.” Here, the “for” is transactional. The thing that someone has done something “for” is an object — a medal, a prize, a validation, a vindication.

The transactional “for” indicates a phenomenon in which people do things to get you without getting you. It’s to obtain you and to project a certain relationship onto you dynamic or to project an ideal onto you, then make that ideal a reality. If Fitzgerald’s novel is any indicator, the realization that this ideal one so madly seeks is only a chimera must be violent and or heartbreaking.

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Which brings us to the verse which has become viral on TikTok. Prepositionally, “party for you” becomes “party on you” (1:35-2:00)

You could watch me pull up on your body
Like it's summer, take my clothes off in the water
Splash around and get you blessed like holy water

I don't know what you were waiting for
You know that I've been waiting for you
(I only threw this party for you)

Yeah, if you saw my tears, would you touch me?
Kiss me on the mouth, say you love me?
Leave a message, tell me you're sorry?
Hit me right back, hit me right back
Why you treating me like someone that you never loved?

In this section, which is mostly sung as one long, mesmerizing incantation, the speaker focuses mostly on herself. This passage is mostly about what her romantic object will see when they arrive to the party. It makes sense that right before this, party for you becomes “watch me watch me party on you.”

Fundamentally, it’s about her, not the person she loves. It’s about being seen, feeling seen, having this person “come through” and recognize their love for her. Phrases like “watch me” and “saw my tears” emphasize the nature of gaze here. This speaker does not truly love or see her romantic object; she has designated them as the person she wants to be seen by. Oddly, she throws a lavish party for them, but also requests an apology.

Her final line, “Why you treating me like someone that you never loved?” indicates that this person is over her, done. She does not care. But for someone who’s sunk their teeth into a romantic object, the other person’s feelings, interest, or interiority do not matter. What matters is that she wants to recreate whatever mythological magic she thought they had, thinks they still might have.

However, it’s gone. The second verse (2:48-3:23) that’s gone viral now is the one where, even the artist herself admits, the speaker realizes her romantic object is not coming. Others have chimed in, to the sound of 54,000 posts with the hashtag #party4u

In this verse, which repeats “party on you, party on you,” the full realization of the superficiality, the gaze, the obsession, the limerence comes into view. It’s the moment you realize not only that the person you want isn’t coming, that they never will, and that maybe they were never even real. It’s heartbreak at its most existential form.

The beat comes in slowly like a thunder of realization; it’s the sonic hammer of reality dropping on your idealization. The verse slowly descends into a calm madness, chillingly halcyon in its quiet amid a rowdy pop song. It’s the moment in a disaster movie when the family looks over the devastation of their fire-wrecked home, the last moment of eye contact a vanishing couple holds as one of them boards the plane goodbye, the moment you look drunkenly in the mirror and realize they were never who you thought they were, then go back out onto the dance floor like that pause of quiet never happened.

It’s the feeling of ascending rabid within a delusion, before a magnificent crash.

That happens in the last verse, where the speaker whines (4:04-4:17):

“Come to my partyyyyy…Come to my partyyyyyyy.” You can hear the anguished defeat, perhaps a burgeoning cacoethes in her voice. It’s a borderline violent desire that only comes from wanting someone who doesn’t want you. It’s a cry of heartbreak, you can hear the bawl in her voice.

This is her final, desperate plea to get the person she wants. Only the person doesn’t want her. The person might not even really exist. It might just be that she is dying for the project she has in her mind, to be finally seen, to win over a romantic object.

Notably, the song ends with a recording of a cheering crowd, even though the recording is not performed live, and is part of a famously covid quarantine era album all about being stuck at home. The song likely ends with this facade of being watched and having an audience, because that’s ultimately what the speaker wanted, and that’s what we all want. To feel seen, understand, watched. For someone to “watch me party on you.” For someone to look at us, and to be a better mirror than any piece of glass could ever be.

Section 4…Superficial Longing and “Cruel Optimism”: “Green Light” and the green light and the blue phone light

Recently, my ex got engaged. I watched videos of his engagement party on Instagram. This time, the gaze was inverted. I was not trying to capture his sight or perception. I was merely looking.

Now, he was throwing the lavish party. And it gave Gatsby himself a run for his nouveau riche money. My ex’s parents make about five million dollars per year (to this day, my major lament about failing to maintain my relationship with him is failing to secure the bag of all bags).

But he did not throw the party for me. There’s no one for him to sing “I only threw this party for you” to. Maybe his fiancee, at best. But really, had thrown the party for himself. He threw the party for his fiancee, for the engagement, for his relationship.

The closer that “for” gets to the thing the party is actually for, the closer you get to true love. As in, if you throw an engagement party that’s actually for your engagement, for yourself as a newly engaged person and for your fiancee, that’s real. If you throw a party for someone else who is not there, if you throw a party under the guise of a party but it’s really to impress/woo/seduce someone, you’ve gotten further from the point. At his party, there was no object to obtain, just the celebration of what I imagine and hope is true, healthy love.

All to say that: these written works portray a kind of love which is superficial. It’s limerent. There’s something wrong. For one, real love and soulmate-ship is reciprocal; if this person was really your person, they’d be at the fucking party with you. Secondly, obsessing over or wanting someone to the extent that they become a point of physical fixation: a light, prey to lure in with your epic party, it is clear that you are projecting something onto them.

Looking back, I had placed too much upon him. I didn’t really know him.

I recently had a sex dream about my ex’s fiancee, then about him. I saw a Jungian psychoanalyst to tell me what the latter dream meant. Yes, I live in LA.

My dream about my ex began after we just finished having sex. I recall feeling satisfied in the dream. The sex was satisfactory, not terrific, but good. I then began trying to sneak out of my ex’s house. I tip toed around trying to gather my socks, keys, dignity. As I did this, I heard him sobbing in the bed, asking for me to come back so we could “talk about everything.” I said “Yeah, sure,” then smirked as I slid out into the hallway with my things, knowing I would silently escape. This time I would leave him high and dry.

On my way out, I passed a mannequin wearing a fabulous skirt. I was enamored by this skirt. I tried silently to reach for my phone to snap a picture of it, so I could find it online or sew it myself. I wasn’t able to take a photo with all the stuff I was holding. I saw something that looked like the skirt’s tag, which had been cut off. I figured I would use the details on it so find the skirt online, so I stole the tag, figuring it had been meant to go in the trash anyway. When I got home, I realized the tag was actually a jewelry box with real gold and silver bracelets inside.

My Jungian psychoanalyst told me the following: “It’s interesting that the real energetic charge of the dream is the skirt, not the sex. As you’re speaking, it even sounds like what was most exciting for you in the dream was this clothing and jewelry, not him. These are superficial things adjacent to who he is and his presence in your life. I think this dream is telling you that there is something superficial about this relationship, and there is something superficial to your attachment to him. You also seem to think that you can have this little attachment, take one little thing with you, but it’s actually much bigger than you think. And it’s very superficial and doesn’t seem to have anything to actually do with talking with him or sleeping with him.”

She mentioned something about money, and I gasped, because I hadn’t even told her the backstory that my ex’s family is fabulously wealthy.

There’s a reason why the green light is green. Any high school English teacher will tell you this color partially symbolizes money/wealth. Sure, Jay Gatsby may actually love Daisy and Nick may actually love Gatsby for their unique charm, reassuring quality, and charisma; it might also simply be the way wealth makes a matte rock glimmer rainbow like a diamond in the sun.

Money imparts certain qualities that may not really be there, much like the dispersion of gemstones, wherein its white light is separated into white’s component colors. Shone under the right light, any jewel creates a spectral display known as “diamond fire.” In a dark room, a diamond goes back to a series of translucent cuts, ready to reflect onto the viewer whatever colors it wants to see.

Not only was it possible that I was simply enamored by his wealth, but perhaps enamored by the flush image I had of him and our relationship in my head. Independent of finances, I projected an idea onto him and a future onto our connection that wasn’t really there.

I was in love with something deeply superficial, a facade on multiple levels. He would pretend to be something he wasn’t at times, trick me into wanting him more than I really did, and I found myself anxiously obsessed with “getting him,” the Birkin of romantic objects. Like the Birkin bags torn apart on social media only to be revealed as cheap stitching and cardboard, there wasn’t much to be valued beneath the facade I had initially seen in us.

“Green Light” by Lorde is an ecstasy. Listeners have spent days pacing their room after hearing it. The build up to the chorus feels like the tremor before a manic episode, the moment before a kiss, the final spin of a plane’s wheels on the ground before it ascends into airspace. Hearing the song’s crescendo feels like accomplishing the impossible, like being able to hold light in your arms. It’s the feeling of wanting something so hard you feel like it’s really there; but as the chorus beckons (2:34):

“I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it.”

The song’s ecstasy is really just the mania a person feels from wanting and waiting. It’s limerence, the idea of a person, wanting someone you feel sees you, of feeling seen for the first time. None of these things are true love, necessarily, but they feel so good to want and to fantasize and so crushing when you realize you may never, ever get them.

She sings: “I’ll come get my things, but I can’t let go.” This line shook me when writing this and thinking about my dream. You can try to collect your shit, grab your phone and your car keys and leave your lover’s house, but it doesn’t mean you fully let go. You never detached from the dream of this person. I never fully detached, not until I thought about all of this.

As I awoke to text messages from friends about the Instagram stories of my ex’s engagement, I returned again to my blue light, like moth to a flame, deer to a headlight.

I was inundated with screenshots of an account I had blocked years ago. My friends assumed that amid the protective fog I had ensconced myself in, I would want a flashing beam to see what I was missing at the far end of the dock.

The engagement party, owing to the immense wealth of my ex’s parents, honestly put whatever shindig Jay Gatsby had to shame. Baz Luhrmann wishes he could have gotten an invite for inspiration. I watched videos of my ex and his new fiancee stand, literally, on a third-story balcony, overlooking the guests in the backyard below, all looking up to the couple like new royalty. Large heaters, twinkly lights, and suited servers punctuated every photo.

My ex broke up with me saying that he could not imagine being in a relationship for longer and needed “a long time to be single,” but a friend saw him on Hinge two weeks after we broke up; a year later, a new friend revealed to me that he had met up with my ex from Grindr just a month after we broke up. As they jerked off together in the back of my ex’s white Mercedes, he said to my now-friend, “I want to take you on a real date and treat you right.”

He told me he wanted to stay friends, but every attempt I made at friendship was met with ghosting or cruel avoidance.

During our relationship, he confessed that he needed to have sex but didn’t feel secure enough to have casual sex. So, he would just get into a relationship to have someone to have sex with, get the girlfriend experience, but never intended on committing. He told me this to let me know that actually, he “wasn’t doing that with me” — I was special. I stayed with him for 3 more months.

He was a careless person, smashing up things and people everywhere he went. The Great Gatsby is a timeless portrayal of the desire for people who possess the charisma and beauty of Daisy Buchanan, or even Jay Gatsby himself, and the way this desire will eventually destroy you.

I know there’s a bit of irony in declaring that all my feelings for my ex were a case of limerence, obsession, projection, romantic objectification, and then writing probably the longest essay on this site about it. But I think as far as romantic experiences and human devastations go, limerent love and romantic objectification are perhaps the most powerful. There’s a reason why the most iconic “love story” in the western canon ends in death; why time and time again, stories about love turn violent. Desire, especially when it’s for a person who you’ve led yourself to believe can fulfill everything you want, see you, understand you, can turn violent and obsessive in an instant.

In Romeo and Juliet, people die over this kind of “love.” In The Great Gatsby and “party 4 u,” people throw immaculate parties. People die too, there. In the novel and “Green Light,” people wait and wait for a light that may be just that — an illumination of something you can never really have. A trick of the eye that can eclipse upon itself as quickly as it shone.