Debunking the Fairy Tale: Love, Not Forever.
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I laid out my exit strategies like a winning hand of cards, matter-of-factly explaining all the permutations that led directly to our demise.
His aqua eyes searched mine for a hint of softness. Finally, sad and exasperated, he said, “Life would surely go on.”
Despite my insistence that we were doomed, these words pinned me down.
We both had distinguished collections of ghosts of former lovers who had shaped us, who carved their respective imprints into our hearts before we’d parted ways.
These ghosts we recall with sterling affection. They are our heart’s cherished and wilted endeavors. They are inextricable to our life’s perspectives. They’ve programmed within us our own unique beats. With so many ghosts dancing inside, it’s no wonder it’s so damn hard to find a single other heart to beat in sync with our own.
Studying his ghosts became one of my most masochistic pastimes.
Gorgeously untouchable phantasms of seductive giggles and long-lashed tender glances, wispy offerings of forever that eventually blew away. He told me that if I left, we would each leave a gaping void in the heart of the other, but eventually we would both find someone new. Someone new. Someone new. God damn, that was cutting.
Never had I wanted more to wear a ghostly veil.
Canonized and beloved, I would no longer be subject to the encroaching threat of replacement, unlike my disposable flesh and bones that would be fucked and fought and loved and lied to and eventually deemed obsolete or inadequate.
As a ghost, I could escape the banal routine, the unsexy mornings, the painstakingly predictable conversations. I’d dodge the dreaded fate of wearing out and being replaced. I would never pale in comparison to a hot young seduction.
All I wanted was for him to say that the world would end if I left.
That my departure would annihilate his heart into a state of jagged of disrepair. I wanted to hear that I was the one he had been waiting for, that I was entirely irreplaceable. But this conversation was tired and these roles we’d been playing, unflattering. Even if he’d said it, neither of us would have believed it.
He told me from the beginning that Scorpios have an obsession with beginnings and endings. I’m always looking for the exit. Maybe I did have a proclivity for orchestrating grandly tragic finales from benign blunders.
But still, just beyond my escape route, I could see a line of breathless lululemon clad ingénue groupies forming. It wouldn’t be long before he’d find a petite, pretty little thing whose warm curves he would learn to fall asleep in, someone who would breathe new life into his world. This thought was the easiest way to break my heart. I was, in fact, replaceable.
I knew from experience that my role would be easy enough to fill.
My boyfriend vacancies had always been filled quickly, too. But my own ghosts remind me that the essence, the ineffable magnetic pull between us, the knowing looks, the swirling chemicals that flooded my guts when our chests were pressed against each other, those would be missed.
That sense that we could track each other’s heartbeats across town. His wit. The way he gently grabbed the back of my hair when he kissed me. Our daily dances between our darkest shadows and shiniest mornings — that he was someone who could look at light and dark unflinchingly, just like me. That would all be irreplaceable. That was all.
I’m writing this because I have become disenchanted.
I have this urge to assign black and white truths and lies to it all, to give my whelping little heart a compass of how to proceed in the world after realizing that I’ve been duped by saccharine fairy tales.
Here’s my pathetic admission that I’m at once demoralized and sustained by the notion that people fall in love all the time, with multiple people. There is nothing more heart-breaking or more hopeful. It’s the bold and endlessly philandering thread that runs throughout human history and strangles the little girl’s dreams of finally finding The One.
I’m writing because I wanted true love to be definitively enough to deem it worthy of exclusivity.
And it’s not.
I’m writing in response to the achingly profound Atlantic article that came out yesterday which spoke to the temporariness of love, urging us to forget what our mommas told us and to find love in every day connections.
“It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship. Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.”
She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person — any other person — whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day.
We live in an age of constant blasts of ads, social media and online dating to keep us insatiably hungry for love and sex and power.
One seemingly innocuous meandering click and you’re lambasted with a galaxy of flashing porno pop-ups. Did you know that Cecilia is DTF? Did you know that there is a horny MILF just .5 miles from your house? Have you seen the pictures your ex posted to Instagram? There’s their life, summarily captured, sitting blissed and alluring, in a Jacuzzi.
All of it is within your reach, just an IM away. Opportunities for micro-moment positivity resonance abound.
I’m writing because I have watched my friends date multiple people at a frantic pace. They burn through connections of varying intensities and temperatures, trying to navigate it all with a copacetic shield.
Jesus, we endure a million vulnerabilities and a million offerings of different pieces of our hearts that are buffeted or returned callously or consumed thoughtlessly and wrung dry.
These lightning-speed pursuits of love are frying us out — we’re not hard-wired for relating to complete strangers through the lens of “Can you satisfy my deepest desires?” within the first 20 minutes of meeting them.
“Are you the one I’ve been waiting for?” we wonder while slyly peeking over the menu, studying their foreign mannerisms for clues. And while we know how unreasonable it is that a single person could ever fulfill our refined tastes, we still look for it desperately in another person.
Romantic relationships are becoming increasingly perishable. We race through them, searching for the next best one with unwarranted gusto.
I’m writing because this is not how I thought true love was supposed to play out.
I’m writing because I think Milan Kundera was right when he said, “Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.”
But that’s what we do, because love has serious opportunity costs and we have so many options — it’d be a crying shame to make the wrong choice.
I’m writing because I wonder how many of my choices and accomplishments were made out of some deep-seated belief that they would win me true love. Because I was raised to believe that finding your love and life partner was the pinnacle of life’s achievements.
Nothing could be more rewarding than having someone see you fully and choose you. Is that the undercurrent that’s guided my life’s decisions and culled my personality? Is this why I have coveted endless images of beauty and style and seduction in such vast iterations?
I want to be everything so that I can never be replaced by something I am not. My heart was trained to relentlessly pursue becoming enough just for the sake of being fiercely held and protected by another. Because I have always believed that if I am replaced by someone else, that means that I lost.
I have gone through life searching for that other person to validate me, praying that they don’t splinter my heart into a mess of spidery fractures in the process. And then, earlier today, Rumi appeared in my newsfeed to deliver a message I desperately needed to hear, “Please shatter my heart and create a new room to hold limitless love.”
The new truth I am learning to hold is this: I cannot be everything in this lifetime.
I got this body. There are certain feelings I would prefer to escape, certain lessons I’d prefer not learn, but they are uniquely mine and they are inherently limited.
Beneath our individual human experiences, our souls are limitless and eternal, but this body is ephemeral and I am starting to accept that no one in the world could understand its endless complexities and love it and value it more than I can.
Perhaps the reason I am disillusioned with love is because my pursuit of it in relationships has usually been attached to some form of a disgracefully egotistical test to prove my worthiness in the world.
I’m beyond over that approach, thanks.
As I unravel this raw awareness, my prayer is to create a limitless love that may even one day transcend micro-moment positivity resonance.
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Desiree Lyons is a humanitarian yogini writer busy with the business of unraveling beliefs, social constructs and people (herself included) to their sweet pulsing core. Having spent the better part of the past decade working for an international aid organization, she has traveled the world on business and in pursuit of her own pleasures and revelations. Repeatedly slack-jawed by the vast realm of life paths, truths and manifestations of love in the human experience, she is a perpetual student, grateful for all the unexpected teachers in her life. She’s into non-dualist spirituality, written words that make her gasp and snicker, chocolate chip cookies, handstands on the beach, and whiskey. She’s writing a book that should be finished sometime in the next decade or so, but until then, you can read more from her here.
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