Love at First Smell

The mysterious yet unmistakable force of amorous olfaction

The lingering kiss of garlic and basil in the air and the rich aroma of simmering tomatoes was the homemade spaghetti sauce Dad made. A golden sweetness rising with steam, thick and heady, like sunlight spun into scent, then the caramel warmth dancing with a sharp, crystalline edge was making hard candy with Mom. These are scents, and they spell my most cherished childhood memories.

Also: the eminence of Mom when she walked through the door smelling like the hospital. This one, the hospital, it's what my first love also smelled like. Perhaps that explains how hard and near-fatally I fell for her. The hospital was a childhood home where I returned every day after school and where I spent weekends, sitting at the bedside of my sister who lay broken and comatose. Sterile air laced with antiseptic and whispered prayers, the crisp bite of alcohol, the faint ghost of worn linens.

Hope and heartache weave through the hallways in places like these, where beeping monitors measure time. The heartbreak of those days were matched only by the joy later, seeing her survive against predictions and all odds. We watched her emerge, incrementally over a great deal of time, from unconscious to awake. The first words she spoke in her new voice—mom and home.

The body secretes pheromones through sweat, skin, saliva, urine, or other bodily fluids. The signals are received immediately, unmistakably, emotionally. The pheromone-laced heat rising from a body is only perceptible by the olfactory bulb, or the vomeronasal organ, located inside the nasal cavity. These signals bypass conscious smell perception and interpretation and directly affect the brain, the hypothalamus, which regulates emotions, hormones, and behavior.

On our first date, I sat with my now fiancé on a blanket in the grass. Spring was folding into summer and the trees in that park in Reno had flowered. They were shedding that day, little seed heads releasing from on high, tiny feathery structures like puffed snowflakes filled the warm air. As they floated and settled around us, a nearby stream babbled, the perfect soundtrack. It was as if invisible fairies designed and architected the setting to facilitate a first kiss, and it was a little too on the nose.

We held hands, and the electricity between our fingertips alarmed me. It seemed too powerful for a first encounter. To verify, I asked, “Can I smell you?” Her eyes softened and a slight smile lifted her perfect mouth. “Yes,” she said. I leaned forward and pushed her black, curly hair aside, inhaled her neck just over where it curved into her shoulder. A memory was there, a whisper of something familiar yet wild. It stirred something inside me, a pull in the ribs, soft and dizzying,

where longing meets the quiet hum of home. I sat back and smiled. “You smell right,” I said.

When I read In Sensorium: Notes for My People by Tanaïs, I was reminded of all this. The book is a lyrical memoir that blends personal history, sensory experience, and postcolonial critique, using scent as a lens to explore identity, memory, and the impact of colonialism. Tanaïs ultimately presents fragrance as an act of healing — a way to reclaim histories that were stolen or erased by colonization, war, and displacement. Smell becomes a form of resistance — by reconnecting with traditional South Asian scent materials (such as attars and incense), they challenge the Eurocentric dominance of the fragrance industry. This ties into larger movements of decolonization in art and storytelling, where marginalized communities reclaim their histories on their own terms. By scenting their way through history, Tanaïs offers a deeply personal and collective path toward healing.

Meeting Nicole in Reno and being swept completely into the pheromone storm of us — a 24-hour long first date that marked the beginning of the end for other women and me — I had never experienced such powerful chemistry so quickly. And nearly three years later, it hasn’t diminished. Eventually, she moved to San Diego where we joined our lives in a powerful way that combines our complementary creative energy. What I mean is, we have built businesses and communities and whole worlds together that will continue to grow and ripple out goodness and that ultimately prove those invisible fairies were actually not overdoing it. They knew it was the least they could do for what was only then beginning, budding and flowering and releasing.

Of course it hasn’t been all invisible fairy parties with perfect light and fake snow and the sounds of dancing water. No real relationship is without difficulty and hard inner work. In this relationship though, looking back over our still short time together and what I hope is just the beginning of a very long road, the difficulty seems to have been purposeful, like it knew what it was doing. It was growing us, stretching us, making us better. It wasn’t torturous spiraling down and circling the drain with seemingly no real reason except to exhaust us, like I’ve experienced before.

In bed one morning after she left it, I rolled over and smelled her on the pillow. The olfactory imprint of her and how it clings to spaces and fabrics. There was a melancholy that passed through me then, unexpectedly, as I imagined how it would feel if her absence was permanent, and that lingering imprint would be all I had left. How would I hold it? Capture it? Make it stay?

After we had been dating for months, we met up in Paris. On a bridge near midnight in front of the sparkling Eiffel tower after a romantic dinner cruise, she stopped walking and pulled me to her. She said, “I have a question for you…”

“Uh oh,” I said.

“Will you be my girlfriend?”

I laughed. I had been telling her I wanted her to be my girlfriend since our second date, and she told me to slow down, we were only getting to know each other.

“I’ll think about it,” I joked.

Two years later, in that same spot, again near midnight, and again after a romantic dinner cruise on the River Seine, I asked her to marry me. She said yes. We planned for a long engagement. We have both been married before; those experiences ended badly. After she said yes, I asked the question in a different way, “Will you heal and redefine the idea of marriage with me?”

Tanaïs’ writing connects smell with intimacy, describing how scent stays behind after romantic relationships end, in the haunting absence left behind. The dissolution of their marriage is framed not just as an emotional experience but as a sensory loss — a fading of familiar scents that once provided comfort and belonging. They explore how smell operates as a record of closeness, much like how a perfume or the scent of a partner’s body can evoke deep longing, nostalgia, or grief. This idea matches with how olfactory memory works scientifically — smell is a direct line to the limbic system, the part of the brain that makes emotions and memories. Tanaïs uses this biological truth to underscore the deep emotional resonance of love and heartbreak.

Since I proposed and my partner said yes, many people have asked me when the wedding is. Just as we have experienced marriage as a form of both security and constraint, we have also taken the journey of self-reclamation in the aftermath of loss. Now, as queer women, we remain engaged and unmarried in part to challenge heteronormative ideals of romance and partnership, reflecting on how queerness exists beyond the boundaries of tradition. Much like the phenomenon of smell itself, which defies rigid categorization (masculine vs. feminine, strong vs. subtle), love, too, can exist in a space of fluidity and reinvention.

We talk about our eventual wedding often and we’re choregraphing a tango dance to perform there for our witnesses, our beloved community. And at that time and place, I have no doubt, the invisible fairies will be working their magic, and the air will be filled with our unique and powerful pheromone storm, and water will be dancing somewhere nearby. As I write this, she is away, back in Reno to be with her family through a trying time for her mom. And when I feel it, the missing her, what I long for more than anything is that spot at the hollow of her neck I have returned to again and again.