and that has really ruined me.
“Isn’t love all we’re really put on the earth for?” my dad says over thanksgiving, while we’re all watching The English Patient and I’m trying to figure out why being alive is so hard for me and why everything feels so complicated and confusing when it really is quite simple.
“I guess,” I reply. I don’t feel like I agree with him, because there are so many other things that I want for my life outside of loving other people. There are places I want to go and things I want to achieve and works of art I want to make and none of that really has to do with fostering love for anyone else. Every time my mother has told me that my parents are together because they are both hopeless romantics, I’ve rolled my eyes and assumed that they’re together because they need each other, because their lives have become too entangled and it’s easier to stay than to ever change anything.
That says a lot more about me than it does about my parents, who are actually, truly hopeless romantics and who really do love each other, regardless of all the stuff that irritates them about one another.
I never thought I shared the same affinity for love that my parents do. I’ve found that relationships (of any kind) are more frustrating than they are rewarding, and often involve a lot of effort on my part to be interesting and to hang out in the places where other people will be and to know a little about a lot of things so that I can talk about (almost) anything so that the pressure is never on anyone else to carry the conversation or go out of the way for me and, as tiring as this gets, I still do all these things and put a significant amount of effort into the people I choose to know because without them, my life really would have no meaning or purpose at all.
The more I think about how I am, and how everything I see reminds me of someone or another, and how I share almost everything in my life with other people, I’m beginning to believe that I might have the same crazy, fucked up notion my parents have. And that really sucks, because no one likes admitting that they desperately, whole-heartedly crave other people. Especially not me. I’ll try to pass it off a hundred times over like I could spend a day by myself, with only a book or a ukulele or my thoughts and feel content, but none of these things make me feel full the way other people can.
Today alone, I cleaned another corner of my room and accidentally melted a plastic trashcan on my roof and spent another 10$ at a coffee shop and wrote and deleted three whole blog posts and watched four crash course videos on chemistry and learned two songs on the piano and cooked eggs for myself and yet none of this made me feel productive or happy because it involved being alone for pretty much 15 hours straight which is my version of a living hell, especially when the people I want to talk to leave me on read or are too busy to finish conversations and use three words to reply to the things i heavily deliberated while writing and thought through thoroughly because I really, really like talking to other people and I really, really care about the conversations I have with them.
But this is beside the point, because some days I just wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Or more accurately in the wrong mindset. And some days I want other people to prioritize me the way I prioritize them, but other people didn’t have parents who passed down a genetic affinity for personal relationships and they didn’t grow up wanting nothing more in life than really wonderful, fulfilling connections with other people that could just instantly fix a natural tendency to have a shitty attitude. I had those parents.
I will deny I said it (except now I’m putting it on the internet so I really can’t), but some part of me has always thought the idea of marriage was nice. Having a family, eh, it has never been super important to me, but the idea of having someone to share your entire life with; that’s kinda spectacular. Granted, 50% of marriages end in divorce and people talk about how marriage is literally just becoming someone else’s property and it’s supposed to be super hard and awful and another empty promise that people make each other, so maybe it’s not that amazing. But in theory, it’s really something.
I almost cried listening to someone play the piano last week because something about the melody felt like a wedding. I didn’t know how to describe that without sounding weird, so I didn’t, but the keys were rolling off one another and I daydreamed flowers and my parents crying and hands and this feeling of contentedness and it almost brought me to tears because I knew exactly what I was imagining and at the same time I knew I would never find that.
I know that sounds pessimistic and dark but the thing is, I’ve been given incredibly unrealistic ideas about love. Maybe marriage is a flawed concept and people really change too much to ever make a commitment like that, and I can accept that. But the problem is I have this idea that somewhere on earth there’s someone that is supposed to just “get” me. And I have this belief because my mother met my father halfway around the earth from she was born, in a chance encounter that could have easily never occurred, and because my sister met her husband while working a summer job in Alaska, and this guy she barely knew just up and went to Costa Rica with her, because the best stories are the ones that sound absurd and don’t make sense, that make you feel like there’s magic in ordinary things and places.
Isn’t that what makes fictional stories so appealing? They’re a world where there are happy endings, and people have soulmates, and everything feels as simple as it is at its core. Because life really is simple. It’s nothing without other people to share it with.
I haven’t fully given up on the idea that there’s someone who can take care of me in the ways I need, someone who could make all the complicated things about life feel simple and irrelevant. It’s more like, I wonder how many places I’ll have to run from before I happen-stance-edly run into this person. I’m also pretty sure that if I just stopped looking around every corner and being hyperaware of everything in my life, things would fall into place much better.
But, I can’t help it. Like I said, my parents are hopeless romantics, and this has ruined me. Two hopeless romantics don't result in the upbringing of a girl who wants nothing to do with relationships and detests the idea of caring about another person, as much as I want to (and try to make myself) feel that way sometimes. They say “I act, therefore I believe,” but no amount of being physically abrasive towards other people has made me care less about them, and I’m starting to think I should accept that reality. So, maybe I do invest a lot of effort in other people, and maybe I overshare, and I invite imbalanced relationships, and I expect more than most people can give, but these don’t have to be signs of emotional backsliding. I know I’m growing because even on days like these, I believe life can be as simple as “I like being around these people, so I will be around them,” and all the bullshit worrying about coming across as crazy or obsessive can just fade into irrelevance because that’s what it is; Irrelevant, and bullshit.
In conclusion, to better reply to something someone said to me at 3am over a pot of mac and cheese, I could care less if I had a stay at home husband. What I really want is someone I can come home to, from wherever I go on different days of the week. I like to believe that there’s someone who will be there when it matters most, because no one can truly be there all the time. I wouldn’t ask someone else to give up a life for me, I just want someone who knows the things that hurt me and cares and does their best to avoid doing those things, someone who wants to invest effort in a relationship. What I really want is to find a way to stop believing this person exists, and they’re out there somewhere, because maintaining unrealistic hopes is crushingly exhausting.