Dan: “You can tell a lot about a person by what’s on their playlist.”
Greta: “I know you can. That’s what’s worrying me.”
Begin again, 2013.
We’re constantly hearing that romance is dead. That dating apps, movies, and music have ruined us to the point where we can’t even fathom a relationship that isn’t everything we want it to be. When our eyes meet those belonging to someone who we’re attracted to on so many levels, one of our immediate reactions would be to walk over and let them know why we’re made for each other. Yet the most likely response is to find their online profile and decide whether this is a reasonable match. I mean what if their pictures suck, they don’t like puppies, or worse, they’re one of the few that don’t believe in having an online persona.
Romance is all but dead. We perpetuate its memory with every excited step we take to our regular bar hoping for some quotable magic moment. We even have the perfect soundtrack in our mind for this inexistent relationship. There’s a daydreamy excitement that tells us it will all work out. However, more often than not, it really doesn’t. And so we live like hermits for a few days, living on a steady diet of watching movies in our pajamas while stalking the horrible person who left us hanging, and their ridiculous pretentious images we thought were so cool a few days prior.
Mary: “I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work so I called him at home and then he e-mailed me to my Blackberry and so I texted to his cell and then he e-mailed me to my home account and the whole thing just got out of control.”
He’s Just Not That Into You, 2009.
To be young and –attempting to be– in love in modern times is tough. There’s so many possible outlets that it can get confusing to know if you’re even using the right one, or taking the right amount of advantage. There are moments when we feel like we’re insane to want something more instead of just letting go of our long-held hope. And it’s not just us, because other people look at us like we’re a bit love-deranged for hoping that the guy we had a nice chat with two days ago, isn’t going to kidnap us and turn our skin into a purse when we actually meet them in person.
Jessie Cave seems to get all the neurosis that sprouts from modern love, from getting ahead of ourselves to the point that we might scare the person we’ve just met twenty minutes ago, to getting to certain stage in a relationship when we don’t know if we can go back or move forward. Her doodles seem to encompass all the anxiety that comes with the modern age and the impact it has on our romantic notions and imaginations.
Nathan: “ I’m no good at this serious girl stuff, feelings and shit. I fancy you!”
Misfits, 2009.
Each of Jessie’s sketches resonates with those of us who have spent entire sleepless nights trying to write the perfect text to answer a question that could easily be responded with a yes. To the four-hour conversations with our friend as she scrolls through the history of texts to dissect where it all went wrong. But instead of simply pointing at our demented over-thinking in a criticizing way, her work shows us that she gets it. What’s more, she’s been where we’ve been.
Chris: Everything you could ever want from an evening. Songs, choir girls, colorful costumes, fellatio… rabbits.
Maxxie: Rabbits?
Chris: Don’t ask.
Skins, (2007)
Through humor and numerous referencing these pretty drawings calm our overactive imagination and neural systems by being sounding board to our own romantic issues. They tell us that we’re not crazy; we’re just byproducts of a society that values love but seems to only want perfection, one that would prefer a perfect phrase said under the moonlight than actual honesty, one that seems to live in the clouds hoping for just a bit of reality but not too much; after all, it clashes with our dreams.
Jessie has recently come out with a book featuring her insight into modern love titled Lovesick. You can also check her daily art here.
