Hopeless

A disjointed account of my romantic history

I’m writing 100 Essays in 100 Weekdays.

This is 63.

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I am a hopeless romantic.

I always have been, and I’d better always be.

But the flavor of it changes with age. Or, I should say, the dominant notes change, while all the flavors of past selves keep riding underneath, like a wine profile growing more complex with time.

(Listen to me talking about wine like I know anything. I don’t drink wine, I eat single-origin chocolate and eat medium-strength cheeses from Trader Joe’s. But I’m pretty sure it’s the same principle.)

Before I got married, my relationship with romance was mostly based in fantasy.

“I saw her from across the room, and I knew she was the one.”

I collected stories of this happening in real life like a little bird, and made a nest of them in my heart. Like a guy I worked with in college who told me about how he’d dated a lot of different girls before he met the girl he would marry, and that the first time he kissed her, it was like an electric shock went through his body. Or the friend who started talking to a girl he met at a party, left with her to walk around town for four hours, and ended up engaged before going home that night.

My favorite romantic comedy was Serendipity, except that I hated watching it because I felt like I could never be truly happy unless that exact thing happened to me, with Kate Beckinsale.

I’m embarrassed to admit all of this because of course I felt that way. It’s like how people say that annoying thing, when they’re sitting around a campfire and throwing in little things to burn, “I’m such a pyro.” You’re not a pyromaniac, you’re a human being. Show me a human being that is not fascinated by fire.

Show me the teenager who doesn’t secretly hope that one day they’ll meet some beautiful stranger and be swept away by the cosmic revelation that they are soul mates?

Feeling this way does not make a person unique or special. It is, rather, a wonderful universal. We can’t help but feel this way because it is the simplest answer to a hunger for connection that we are born with.

Perhaps the thing that differentiates us a bit from one another is what we do with this deep intrinsic desire. Even people who seem to actually find a soulmate will also find that one person cannot fully fill the hollow core of their personal humanity.

I love my wife more now than I ever have, but it was never and will never be the way I fantasized it would be. It took me close to two years to come to my senses and ask her to marry me. I was so blinded by the countless little cinematic moments I had contrived in my own imagination that it took me that long to recognize I had stumbled across a winning lottery ticket. All I had to do was go cash it in.

Back when I was compulsively pining for love-at-first-sight magic, I also worried about how that could be sustained for a lifetime. What will happen when I’m old and tired? What will happen when she isn’t young and hot? What about when there are kids and work and bills and sickness and death?

So, mixed into my cup of steaming romantic hunger was a strong shot of anxiety. Can that magic even last? I wondered. At the time, in actual (retrospectively cringe) conversations, I would hypothesize that even the memory of being overpoweringly in love would be enough in the hard times. As though it were a trip to Disneyland that could be remembered fondly as one trudged the muddy road of regular life.

Thankfully, I’ve grown up and learned some things. Doubtless I’ll learn more.

What I know now is that love is only ever about today. When I married my wife, it was because, at the time, she had become my best friend. There was no one else I wanted to hang out with more, in any context. She was the coolest and most fun person I knew, and she was also hot. (Like I said, lottery ticket.)

Today, thirteen years later, those things are still true. She is still my best friend. She is still hot.

Tomorrow?

Well, tomorrow doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m married, and that’s a commitment that I take more seriously than any other I’ve made, but none of my intentions to keep it matter further than today.

It’s hard to communicate this the way I mean it, the way I’ve discovered that it matters. I’m not saying that maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and things will be different. What I’m saying is that whatever happens tomorrow cannot matter today.

The fantasies I had when I was younger, about soulmates and love-at-first-sight, were really fantasies about magically solving the whole future in one day, in one moment. It was the thirst for a happily ever after. Life is hard, and complicated, and scary, and full of pain, so wouldn’t it be just lovely if, in one beautiful moment, all of life from that point forward would be nothing but joy? Love conquers all and forevermore, amen.

Anyone who’s fallen in love, soulmate or no, and anyone who’s lucky enough to be in a good marriage (yes, it comes down to luck), knows that happily ever after isn’t, like, a thing. There is no moment after which all life’s problems are solved and joy spools out uninterrupted.

The grand revelation, which comes sometimes slow and sometimes fast, and is, at least for me, hard to hang onto, is that eternity is just today, and today can be full of joy, if you just open up to it. That revelation doesn’t require love-at-first-sight, or a dream job, or any other fantasy fuel. It just requires being alive today, and hearing it, and believing it.