Every summer I try to be like Rihanna.
It's the perfect time to try to capture Rihanna’s effortless charm and unending chill. The weather’s nice, the atmosphere is light. This is the time to take to the streets in oversized shirts and no pants, laughing off haters and dragging people on Twitter. While other pop stars may try hard to present a facade of calm and careless perfection, Rihanna simply exudes it, sailing along on the current of her own cool. Why not try to emulate her ease now, when it’s hot and everyone's doing their best carefree impressions, before I have to hunker down for the hard days and nights of winter?
Because it’s impossible. Rihanna is the only Rihanna. While she kicked off her week winning the Video Vanguard Award at this year's Video Music Awards, I started mine watching her do it. With Taylor Swift absent and Kanye West incoherent, the big news of the night was (along with Teyana Taylor's built bod), Rihanna's relationship with rapper Drake.
Missing for most of the show, including for his early-in-the-night award win for “Hotline Bling,” Drake turned up to bestow Rihanna with her award. Looking like his grandma had dressed him for his First Communion, Drake got all in his feelings and told everyone how he’d loved Rihanna since he was twenty-two (Drake is 29, in case you were wondering), stoking already-flying Twitter rumors that he planned on proposing onstage. Rihanna smirked and rolled her eyes good-naturedly. No proposal happened (thank goodness), but something far more awkward did.
Drake went in for a kiss and Rihanna subtly thanked him with a hug and went about her business. Cue the gifs and the Twitter rants about Rihanna not possibly being into Drake and think pieces about Rihanna clearly not loving Drake back. While I admit to laughing (really hard) at gifs of Drake’s awkward embrace, and to finding Drake totally annoying, why is it so hard to believe Rihanna likes--and quite possibly loves--Drake?
It probably has something to do with Rihanna’s ever-present chill which doesn't gel well (perhaps at all) with Drake’s own try hard persona, one obsessed with women who have loved and left him and endless pining (with a dash of unattractive self-importance). This is the guy that spent “Hotline Bling” lamenting a woman who now ignores him, not-so-subtly shaming her for daring to care about people and things that aren’t him. This is the guy who seems to have heart eyes for every beautiful woman he meets, like rapper Nicki Minaj or tennis phenom Serena Williams. This grasping, grand-gesturing, bleeding heart? It feels mismatched next to Rihanna, who has a single giving the middle finger to needy men.
But we don’t know Rihanna, and we don't live in her head or her heart. It’s safe to say Drake (who’s known her for years both professionally and personally, and has apparently been in love with her for seven years) has a better sense of her than we do. And since there's plenty of proof that they are, in fact a couple, why do we still maintain it's impossible?
The very reasons we say Rihanna wouldn’t like Drake are the very reasons we can assume she does. Would Rihanna, who once effortlessly dragged people on Twitter really put up with some dude she doesn’t like? Would “Didn’t they tell you I was a savage / fuck your white horse and a carriage” Rihanna really deal with Drake's heart publicly beating out of his chest if she was indifferent to him? If we know Rihanna well enough to say she’d never want to be with Drake, why don’t we know her well enough to say she’d be with, and love, whoever she wants?
But how fair is that to Rihanna, who’s proven time and time again that she’s her own person and makes her own decisions?
I’ve always had trouble shipping (being romantically invested in and wishing for the realization of a romantic fantasy) real life people. Because they are real people, not characters we hope smush faces and live happily every after. This speculation that Rihanna isn't, and would never be in love with Drake implies that if she is, that she's falling short of expectations or simply not who we thought. Following the very public abuse Rihanna endured from ex-boyfriend Chris Brown there’s a contingent of fans desperate to see her in a relationship they’ve deemed worthy of her. But it's not our job to decide who and what is worthy of Rihanna, especially not when she's more than capable of deciding for herself.
