It’s so easy to be everything to someone—for a little while, at least. Do you want to be their one and only? Do you want to hold their heart in your hand, until you grow bored and decide to crush it? It’s simple, it really is. An emotionally-stunted halfwit could figure it out, which is why so many of them do.
When it happens to you, you wonder how they made it happen. You wonder where the magical soulmate went—the person who knew you better than you know yourself, who somehow anticipated your every need, who finished you the way nobody ever knew how.
You wonder how you could have been so stupid. How it could have taken you so long to see.
Well, here’s how.
You have many secrets. Most are the ones you hold, and keep secure from others. But a couple are secrets which you don’t know, and everybody else does. Many of these are commonplace across people.
Here’s one that tends to hold true: your needs are more transparent than you think. You wear your longings on your face, and in your words. Your hopes drip from every conversation you ever have. You write half the scripts to all your fantasies, and you speak them out loud, hoping your co-star will emerge from the crowd and speak all the other lines.
Most hearts sing predictable songs. That’s not to disparage those songs in the slightest. Magic emerges from the everyday: it’s why Happily Ever Afters are possible at all, what with the profound lack of castles on the housing market. The things you want, more often than not, are things which we all know.
Here’s another secret: it’s easier to make your dreams come true than you’d think. I mean, it’s hard for you: you need another person, and you need that person to know their duties, and to fulfill them. Magically conjuring people out of nothing can be difficult.
But if somebody else wants to fulfill your dreams, it will take them less work than you would think. Your dreams are staggeringly huge to you. To other people, they seem fairly normal-sized. And it doesn’t take much work to bring you the miracles you dream of.
Two sorts of people will put that work in:
People who think you’re precious, and want to make you happy.
People who want something out of you.
Some people try to barter for what they want. They’ll offer you a trade. That tends not to go over well, though some sorts enjoy that kind of haggling. If you’re cunning, though, you offer first, and then you ask. Grateful, happy people are more inclined to give you what you want. And if they think you’re the person of their dreams, they’ll give you an awful lot of themselves, if it means getting to keep you in their lives.
The ones who would prey on you know this. They know that, if they can offer you something unique, something you’ve yearned for all your life, they could ask you to slice yourself open and serve yourself on a platter, and you’d do your best not to twinge as you slit your own throat, so as to avoid seeming ungrateful. They know that what they offer you seems vastly more than what they ask for back.
Many of them even believe that, which is why they’re so good at making you believe it too.
What are the tiny miseries scattered across the hours and days, the months and years, compared to the romantic fantasy they’ve let you make of your reality? Who cares if you’re exhausted and anxious, drained of all your colour and life, devoid of friendships and connections, and terrified of slipping up with your lover in the slightest, lest you break one of their countless inscrutable rules? Why would all of that matter, when you’re living out your Happily Ever After? And what sort of fool would sacrifice their one true shot at happiness, just because they’re only happy half the time, if that?
So… what then? What does that mean? Does wishing for happiness mean playing with a loaded gun? Are all your longings just the keys to somebody’s betraying you? Is it foolish to fantasize? Should you just give up?
Well, no.
Here’s another secret, less about you than about people in general:
The hardest thing you can do with another person is love them for who they are. Tolerate their presence, day in and day out.
Deal with their various intrusions on your life. Accept their various quirks, their frustrating behaviours. Understand that they are not you, and that they exist independently of you. They will want things you don’t want, and you will want things they do not.
They will have moods which aren’t yours, and a life which you won’t share.
You won’t learn if somebody can do this for you in a day. You won’t learn if you can do it for them for a long time either. This is not the immediate stuff of your hopes and dreams—it’s just the part where the happiness you find doesn’t implode in your face a week or a month or a year or a decade in. It’s the part where you don’t wind up with regrets. It’s the Ever After part of the Happily.
People who offer to sweep you off your feet, people who seem like your dream come true, are very often people who’ve decided they don’t want to deal with that part of people. They like the fun part, where someone falls in love with them and gives them everything.
They like the convenience. The messiness of people, the part where they’re actually human, that’s not really their bag. They have their fantasy, too, and another living breathing thinking feeling creature isn’t exactly part of it.
Which is why a crucial part of the abuser narrative is that one day, all too abruptly, their perfection vanishes, and they reveal themselves to be cruel and contemptuous. What changed?
Well, you stopped being easy for them. You moved past the point where they just had to pull a few easy levers to stick you in your state of bliss. And because they found this simple way to manipulate people into giving them what they want, they have no patience for anything complicated. So they blame you for being anything less than a convenience, and their manner of blaming reveals how they truly see you: as a snotrag to be crammed into a tiny little box.
People who jump habitually into being The Person Of Your Dreams tend to be people who don’t care about what happens when your dreams are shattered. The kinder-hearted ones may make a few ignorant stabs at being someone’s dreamboat, before they see the pain that causes and learn that True Romance can seriously fuck a person up. If it keeps happening, it’s because the person you’re looking at doesn’t care.
Then, of course, there are the people who think they can only chase their dreams by shoving reality to the side. People who live cycles of love and heartbreak, who don’t need a predator to be utterly destroyed by a new flicker of hope. Some of these people discover each other, and form endless chains of romance and carnage. Some of them learn. Some of them wind up with the sort who uses fantasy as leverage, and wind up very badly hurt, and either abandon their hopes for happiness altogether or begin the long, long, long path towards recovery.
What’s the telltale sign of the wrong kind of romantic opportunity? For starters, beware people who are glib. Beware people who speak of their life experiences as if they’re reciting a resume, and make it seem like their lives are sparkling thrillrides. People who narrate their own life stories often intend to make you supporting characters. People who treat minor moments of connection like star-fated destiny may well be trying to sell you something; best-case scenario, they’re still ridiculously annoying.
Superficial appeal feels like sugar tastes: it’s bright, it’s immediately striking, and if there’s too much of it at once, there may be something rotten at the core.
People of substance, I find, and people who crave substance, are quieter in their appeals. They may be colorful, but their colour feels more like an offshoot of who they’ve become, less like it’s aimed at you as a marketing pitch. They are quietly rather than loudly interested in who you are, and quietly rather than loudly interested in revealing parts of themselves to you. They know what they have to offer. They know how to express what they want.
True romance is a game of patience. That’s not to say it’s boring for a second, but it knows that there’s a long, winding, bumpy road ahead. There’s excitement, but there’s also painstaking care taken to ensure that you know what that excitement means—and what it doesn’t. There are lifetime fantasies fulfilled, but they’re fulfilled in a way that leaves you feeling whole, and puts you in control. There’s no dependency, no fear, no addiction, no desperation. You could leave at any second—and the only reason that you don’t is that you genuinely would rather stay.
And when you meet somebody new and feel that familiar leap in your chest, that familiar sense of eerie and perfect connection, that familiar realization that you crave this person in front of you like you’ve never craved anybody in your entire life… ask yourself a few things about the person you’re with.
Do they care about where you’re at in life?
Do they know how much they mean to you? And will they be responsible about it?
What do they want from you? Are they interested in you beyond those wants?
What are their expectations? Not just the easy ones, but the weird, hard, messy ones?
And lastly:
If the love disappeared, would you still like them as a person? If the romance went away, if the attraction vanished, if you were stuck in a room with this person and had to do nothing more than simply tolerate their existence, and how they talk to you, and how they treat you, and how they spend time when you’re with them… would you still want them to be in your life? Would you still care about them if they weren’t offering you your hopes and dreams?
These questions might not be enough. But if you’re asking them, you’re at least on the right track. And—here’s the trick—you want to make sure they’re asking them too.
Because if they’re not, you have to wonder just how much they care.
Because the hopes-and-dreams stuff is a lot easier than the tolerate-and-enjoy.
Because the best sign that you’ve really met the person of your dreams is that they give a shit about what’ll happen once you finally wake up.
Love, Life, Broken 