Tag: love

Timing and direction

I looked for someone to fall in love with and all I got was a quick-talking new friend who is maybe as smart as he thinks he is.

I think everything happens for a reason, and we meet the people we are supposed to meet for a purpose. I could never date someone who expected life to just work out 50/50 all the time, but I can be friends with just about anyone. Read: I like the way you talk pointedly but you never kissed me.

I love an ambitious, smart man just ask much as the next girl but who is more emotionally intelligent – the accountant or a bag of carrots? Read: I wish you would have kissed me so I would have known if there was (a lack of?) something there.

I’m not necessarily private about my life but I do not bring up anything about myself unless directly asked. Read: Did you know I got into all of the universities you covet and did you know I have twice the ambition of your jobless, immature ex?

But I’m always a good listener, and you can talk an ear off. I think you spoke for us both too soon. I am cool, and I am much more. But you’ll never know now because we’re going to become the best of friends and I will always keep you at an arm’s distance. You’ll never know anything concrete about me, but if you did, I bet you’d fall to your knees and your glasses would fall off your face from the shock. Read: I hope the pavement tastes like regret, like trying to text me after revealing too much.

Maybe if you’d went in another direction. Maybe if it was a different time.

1 a.m.

I met three men over the past three months and spent one month each with them, dipping my summer feet into their iced over swimming pools.

I know that I idealize everything, especially romance. I can create a spark out of nothing, but since it’s not real it never keeps me warm.

I had a birthday and turned 23 and there was no boy who belonged to me sitting across my table singing with my friends. I don’t belong to anyone, which is a wild and freeing thing, but also so lonely.

Why doesn’t anyone ever work out for me? I only think this rarely, like now, when I can’t bring myself to fall asleep.

I know I have years to give but I feel like I’ve been chipping away at it these past few months. Give me one good movie kiss and I’ll give you my whole entire heart on a platter served just the way you like it.

I’m tired of hoping for this one to be the right one, and I wonder if I would be happier if I just gave up trying to find love. I have plenty of love. I have friends and family and a job that I am so happy at, but I crave being held sometimes. Kissing hello, kissing goodbye, and knowing another hello will come soon. If I was kissed today the odds would be slim that the same lips would grace mine ever again because they never stay long.

I fall in love for a month and it throws me under the bus. I don’t even think I fall in love with the person, but the idea that this person could be it!!!!! I wish I could keep my mouth shut to my friends about who I was dating because then they wouldn’t be so sorry for me when I tell them he never replied (again).

I wish I could staple my feelings into my foot and stomp on them every day until they died.

I wish I wasn’t so filled with longing all the time. I feel like I’m in the dark, reaching in front of me for something to hold on to and I just keep swinging my hands around aimlessly. Always reaching but never touching. Will I realize there is nothing there? Or will I just keep reaching forever?

I am so tired. I have work tomorrow. I have to make myself sleep.

invasion of privacy

How are we ever supposed to care about somebody when we’re so busy pretending not to care?

It’s cliche and overdone, but I want to go to the Louvre next year. I will either walk into the museum with my hand firmly planted into the palm of someone else’s hand, or I will walk in alone and happy. I want to explore Paris, in love. Maybe I’ll be with a beautiful tall man or maybe I will be with my beautiful tall self and either way I will be in love.

I think I set up these big brick walls so that nobody would ever make me feel vulnerable again and it’s just resulted in hours upon hours of boring small talk that makes me feel small when I am capable of big intelligent interesting conversations that leave me with more questions than when I started.

I want to commit an act of invasion of privacy. I don’t want to hear about how you secretly like long walks on the beach because everybody with a beating heart likes the sound of water, the colors cast on the sea while the sun sets, and seeing footprints in the sand. We live in California, goddamn it, of course you fucking love the beach.

I want to know if your parents are together or if they are divorced, and why. What did they teach you about life and love that you bring into your own? Did you get along with your siblings? What’s your full name and why did your parents choose that? Were there any other names they were considering and how might your life have been different if you were named Geoff instead of Jeff? I want to learn something from you that I didn’t know I wanted to know.

I want to let you pole vault across my big brick walls of safety and I want to tell you about hyperbolic discounting, and why I think we get anxiety from placing salience on the wrong things. I want to geek out over how much I know about my boy Ben (as in Benjamin Franklin himself), and admit that the second degree I got was for fun. I can tell you all about love and sex in the history of America, because I’ve read hundreds of love letters from dead American couples for my senior thesis.

Tell me about somewhere I’ve never been, about how it feels to be able to fix a broken watch and hear it tick again and know that you put something back together with your hands and how that’s when you decided you were going to be a good engineer.

Above all, argue with me. Tell me I’m not right, and prove me wrong. I’ve never felt challenged intellectually in a relationship and now it’s my top desire in a man. I’m tired of the first two weeks of knowing someone getting filled up with misspelt “your beautiful,” because they never specify exactly what part of me is beautiful and I’m left on a riveting cliffhanger that never gets answered after we have one boring date and never talk again but they always reply with heart-eye emojis to my selfies forevermore.

I don’t know how to ask for these things and I‘m afraid that I come across as someone that may be incapable of connecting on a deeper level.

I don’t know when it’s appropriate to politely say, “Obviously we both find each other attractive or we wouldn’t be on this date, so let’s skip to the chase and peel back the layers of heartbreak that made us so tough to get to know and let’s really get to know each other for the next two hours so that we can make an informed decision on whether there’s something here or not and decide if we should see each other again or not waste our time.”

Is that not recommended? It’s not in my copy of the Why Men Love Bitches book, and it’s not in the “What Guys Really Want To Hear” articles in Cosmopolitan. I know I’m supposed to only be available two-thirds of the time so that he finds me mysterious, and that I have to wait four hours before replying to his Snapchat, but how am I ever supposed to care about someone if I’m busy acting like I don’t care about them?

I live a fulfilling, exciting life. I have the job that I want, my own apartment, a nice little cat, and the best friends ever. I am comfortable with myself and I am proud of my accomplishments. I want to learn more, travel more, and I want to fall in great love with someone that I get to experience new things with. I’m not in a rush, but I am so over 50 First Dates with 50 Boring Guys.

I know it’ll come at the right time, and I guess the right time isn’t now, but lately I’ve been wishing it was. Being in love would probably make this pandemic suck less. For now, I’m just going to live vicariously through Zac Efron’s Down to Earth show and keep trying to perfect my homemade gnocchi recipe.

the best love letter

I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you everyday… I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close… I will love you until your face is fogged by distant memory. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else and I will love you if you never marry at all, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all. That is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.

Lemony Snicket


This is from Lemony Snicket’s “The Beatrice Letters.” If you can, I really urge you to read this out loud to yourself.

I wish I could write something that encapsulated exactly how I feel when I read this. It’s so atomic-bomb-earth-shatteringly beautiful that I am left breathless after reading it. It gives me hope that one day someone is going to think about me like this, about you like this, about everybody. Talk about a soulmate, imagine being the Beatrice to somebody’s Lemony Snicket.

I want to write about it, but I think it really speaks for itself. And truly, it goes on and on, and would probably continue until the end of time if it weren’t for the silly fact that it does have an ending.

Here is the full version.

boundaries

Having boundaries in general, with a lot of people in your life, is good.

“I love people.  I love my family, my children ….. but inside myself is a place where I live all alone, where I renew my springs that never dry up…..”

Pearl S. Buck

I’ve lived in the world of right and wrong for so long that I forgot the grey area, the place where most things exist. Now I have accepted the ability to realize that most things are not mutually exclusive. There is good, there is bad, but nobody and nothing is 100% both. There is peace within the chaos and there is chaos when there is peace. I know that now, and it is within my power to accept both in my heart.

By being able to focus on things that are not people-oriented, I am able to grow as a person. By not focusing on pleasing someone, or trying to stay in contact at all times, I am focusing on myself.

Setting up boundaries isn’t bad. You don’t owe it to anyone to be available 24/7 for whenever they need you. You do owe it to yourself to available 24/7 for yourself when you need you.

One of the best things I have done over the past couple months is turn off notifications on my social media. I set a boundary between me and others, and I feel like I have a healthier relationship with my phone now because of it. It also makes me happier to see what my friends are up to, because I genuinely want to know. I’m not just mindlessly switching between apps for no reason.

Set boundaries, be happy!

impacts

The answer to most of my security questions online is my first grade best friend’s middle name. I used to live in a suburb of Seattle called Puyallup before moving to California in fourth grade. After I moved we never spoke again but I still know her middle name.

There are people I don’t talk to anymore that have had such an impact on my life. I still wear a friend from 8th grade’s P.E. shirt to bed sometimes because we accidentally switched shirts at a sleepover and never ended up giving them back.

I still listen to a band that my very first boyfriend showed me, and it’s one of my favorites.

And I still make a crunchy tuna casserole that one of my elementary school friend’s mom showed me. Half of their casserole was made without peas because her dad didn’t like them but the rest of the family did. I wonder if they still do that.

Our lives are made up of so many people, and sometimes you keep pieces of them long after they have left your life.

At the same time, there are so many lives that you have left some kind of impact on like this. I wonder what parts of me are alive in someone else that I have no idea about.

compatibility + obsession = love?

Last night I sat and talked with a very old friend of mine for hours. We talked about love, and contemplated whether the kind of love that hopeless romantics like us look for is even real. Is the formula for love compatibility + infatuation? I think I have only ever felt one, or the other, and finding a combination of those seems impossible. But at the same time it’s everywhere; it’s in every book I’ve ever read, it’s what I see when I look at my parents’ relationship.

I once said that I was a closet hopeless romantic. My friend responded by saying: 

“Oh my god. You are the most out of the closet hopeless romantic. You are literally running in the streets screaming through a megaphone letting everybody know exactly who you are at all times.”

I am a goal-oriented person. I make goals and then I obsess completely about them until they are reached. I am like a tiny little ant lifting a crumb to bring to the queen. Goal. Goal. Goal. This is a very good way to be when it comes to my career.

One of my biggest goals is to fall in love, but you can’t will yourself into love or set aside some time to do so. I don’t think that the heart really takes your goals under consideration. Hearts are very inconsiderate things.

There will never be a right time, but I think that there is a right person. You just have to find that compatibility and then become infatuated with them (or vice versa), and exist in that state forever. Sounds easy, right?

With dating apps it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that you decide when you get to fall in love, but I just don’t know if that’s how it really works.

I still hope that I’ll meet someone at a party, and he’ll say he couldn’t stop staring at me from across the room. Or at a coffee shop, where he asks “is this seat taken?” and we begin a deep conversation. Or I’m in my favorite book store, and he will compliment my impeccable taste in literature and fall in love with me.

it’s weird that they say hopeless romantics when it’s just the opposite. I’m so full of hope for romance, and I’m so happy that it exists. I just want a taste of it for my own.

bête noire

Noun. a person or thing that one particularly dislikes

I have collected a lot of pictures of quotes and I think it’s cool to look back at them sometimes and see the place you were in. These are all from the last year, screenshotted and saved in my phone while I was going through things that I can’t even remember now.
If it’s not going to matter in five months, don’t give it 5 minutes. These are all from the little five minutes of some intense feeling that I can’t even recall today. This is my little collection of bête noires.


I like that we can look back and be like hey, u good in there buddy? It feels like reading letters from your past self and knowing you really are all the wiser now. I’m not a wise person yet but I am definitely better off now than I was a year ago, half a year ago, even a month ago. We keep learning and we keep growing and that’s super cool and really exciting! Who will I be in six months?? I don’t know but I’m ready to meet her.

honey/vinegar

Maybe he was actually that happy, or maybe his mama had taught him that you catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar.

Junot Díaz

Everything that’s happened during these last few weeks feels like it doesn’t count; like I’m in some kind of limbo.

I can’t be upset at anyone for their actions during this time because I know how stressful everything is.

Too much time with family members, losing a job or being furloughed, and a lack of outlets and normalcy is affecting all of us.

I don’t blame you for not being nice to me, and I promise you I won’t try to get even or get bitter. I believe that things will get better for you and me and if we’re meant to be in each others’ lives in the future then maybe we will be. And I’ll even leave that part up to you.

I’m taking a long, much needed break from social media. Well, like an 80% break. I’ll log in to Snapchat and Instagram only once a day and if I did something worth sharing then maybe I’ll share it but I’m not going to take random selfies and then critique how I look in every single one. You know how people call diets “lifestyle choices?” That’s what I’m doing with social media. Cutting out 80% of the fatty bad parts and useless carbs and only choosing the good protein-y parts.

For my job, a big part of what I do is monitor Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and NextDoor on a loop. Then I go home and jump on Snapchat and Instagram and do the same thing but for myself and it feels like lately I can’t do anything (at work and personally) without sharing it online.

I am a finalist for a national award in my field, and instead of sharing it with everyone I know I just want it to be my experience. I want to selfishly wrap myself around my achievements and not invite anyone to know about them. The amount of pressure I’ve felt about this award for the past two weeks has been more than anything I’ve ever felt before. Whether I win it or not, I want to live in the moment.

I’ll still write, and I will upload here (thank you to everyone who reads this, I didn’t imagine we would get so far!), but I just don’t want to send any more pictures of myself to people.

I don’t want anybody to see me, to be proud of me, to be nice to me, to be mean to me, except for me.

sudden repulsion syndrome

Sudden Repulsion Syndrome is what happens when a small decision or behavior puts an abrupt end to a budding relationship.

I get fight or flight but for relationships.

Like I loveloveloveloved maybe one or two people in my life, and out of nowhere I’d wake up one day and be so disgusted by them. The day before I was writing them in my diary and daydreaming about their cologne, and then suddenly I would gag at the thought of one guy’s laugh, at another guy’s little moles.

I think my least favorite part about myself is how I can never decide on anything but I always know how I feel about someone because my brain sends some strong chemicals 3000% too quick. I don’t know I’m over a relationship until I’m physically repelled by the person I thought I was happy about.

Or I’m 3000% the other way, and the norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin are like little butterflies trying to make their way out of my throat while I profess some kind of undying love.

I’ll fight so hard or I’ll run so fast, and neither of us is ever ready for that.