LOVE: LOVING THE REAL PERSON

We all have fantasies. Some aren’t superficial, either. Some fantasies involve one specific person. Every time we picture our futures with a lover, it’s a fantasy. Imagining how your girlfriend will plan your future engagement, and what you’ll name your future children, and the future house you’ll all live in — it’s imaginary. It’s also ignoring that your partner is a living, breathing person independent of your dreamworld. I have to wonder if mentally painting the portrait we want for ourselves takes us out of the actual moment, impairs us from enjoying what’s right in front of us, gives us delusions about what our lives should or shouldn’t be.

Having a rigged idea of who you’re supposed to end up with and worse, attempting to find them within some societally-imposed timeline… how are these things conducive to building and sustaining a healthy relationship? It’s good, before committing to someone, to think that you might have some sort of future together, but how will you ever know without working on intimacy first? And how can you work on intimacy when you’re already keeping someone at arm’s length by having preconceived notions about the kind of person you’re meant to be with and how they do or don’t meet your expectations?

I’m not proposing that we ban all fantasy, and even if I were it wouldn’t be possible. What I’m proposing is that we live in the moment a little more, that we try hard to remember that our fantasies involve real people who are equal parts flawed and fascinating and that they deserve to be treated as such, and most of all: that if we get deep enough, if we become truly intimate with someone, there will be an endless supply of shiny and new and unknown inside of them, more than we’d ever know what to do with




Loving you feels like having the world’s best publicist. Being with you means knowing that we will encourage each other no matter what we want to do, even if you don’t agree with me, even if you think it’s wrong, even if what I want to do is not necessarily your thing, even if the whole thing turns out to be a complete disaster. “Well hey, at least you tried!” you will always say. Love is about accepting your partner for who they are and who they want to be, not about trying to mold them to what you think they should be. Love is encouraging your partner to be the best they can, because the best relationships are the ones where you both bring the most you have to offer.

Loving you feels like learning a foreign language. At first it doesn’t make any sense to me and I don’t understand what I keep doing wrong. I’m flustered and I sound stupid. But the point of learning a language is that the more time you spend with it, the better you get. Being in love with you feels like learning more about you, what you like, what you don’t like. Loving you feels like being out and seeing something that reminds me of you. Love is like being fluent in you.


Loving you feels like being excited to make a home with you. It’s like making your favorite meal for dinner when you texted me about what a bad day you were having, how you were walking around in the rain all day, no umbrella, and now your socks are wet. I know how you hate wet socks. When we were first dating this was the first thing I ever cooked for you, and it’s been your favorite dish since. Cooking for you is sharing a life together. No matter what awful things happened to you out in the real world, I want you to know that when you come home, it will all be OK