Confessions of a Delusional Girl

by Rachel Loring

I’m on a first date and texting updates to my friend from the toilet. 

First, the rundown: he’s cute, he paid for dinner AND drinks, he dresses good, we are now at a bar playing darts, I’m winning at said darts, he’s nice, and he also hates the healthcare system. I send my texts rapidly, filled with spelling errors and then go back out to the bar. It ended up being a good date. I enjoyed that when I told stories he’d throw his head back in laughter. I liked that he’s a Taurus, because that’s my moon sign and Andrew Garfield said that means we’re compatible. I like that he has a fancy sounding name. It was a good date, and if I were anyone but me, hopeless, perpetual, romantic me, it would have been a really good date. A great date even. Afterwards, I texted my friend a final summation of the evening.

Me: Date was good, but I’m not in love with him

Her: That’s probably a good thing

Growing up, I was always hyper independent, while also being deeply romantic. It made me constantly oscillate between desperately wanting to love and be loved, and knowing, realistically, that I didn’t need love. It didn’t help that I read too many romance books in my formative years and boys never really liked me in middle and high school. 

Those two habits, those two conflicting traits, shaped my dating life into brief moments of intense, hopeless, painful romance and then long stretches of realism, the sobering up that usually took years. I was either 100% in love, deeply devoted or 100% single, entirely over romance, happy to “just work on myself” (the excuse all us twentysomethings use when we’re single and have no prospects).

But that habit is exacerbated by this: I tend to have really magical dating experiences. It’s weird for me not to be completely head over heels for someone after a first date. My dating experiences were like movies, filled with meet cutes and wacky adventures and dream boys with brown hair. Like once, when a date’s car got towed and we had to get a ride from a weird truck driver whose car was littered with bottles of pee. Or the night a different date and I crawled onto his roof and saw two shooting stars (he also may have played me guitar, and sorry to be a gender traitor but I love a man playing guitar at me). I can think of half a dozen other moments like these, calling my friends and saying, it was straight out of a movie I swear. 

It wasn’t until I graduated college and and totaled up the latest emotional damage from a doomed relationship when I saw fully the problems with this approach. I’d use those magical moments as my entire sustenance, something to pin my every hope and wish and feeling on. My love, in retrospect, was really always just obsession wearing a funny hat. I loved in the same way people who are drowning love water, which is to say entirely survivalist, desperate, and ultimately, not really love at all. I remember telling a friend how it felt when I was dating people, like I was turning myself inside out, with all my sensitive nerve endings on the outside and my thick skin uselessly trapped on the inside. 

“That sounds really unsustainable,” 

she said, “and really painful.”

And she was right, for every magical movie moment, there was always the falling action. For every romantic montage there was a long, single-take shot of me sobbing on my bed or rotting on my couch for days. There were the embarrassing, overthinking texts, the desperate pleas for effort, attention, anything adjacent to love. The deep shame from continuously embarrassing myself, from never learning a lesson. 

And the worst part: coming to terms with the fact that magical moments didn’t equate intimacy, or actually promise anything at all.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I can pin my most significant relationships, heartbreaks, and delusions to major periods of insecurity, vulnerability, and confusion in my life. I tend to use love as a way to externalize and project my fears onto other people. Okay, that sounds crazy when I say it like that. Here’s what I mean: in my sophomore year of college I briefly dated a man who was a bit older than me. He had all these friends, he was social and outgoing, and he took me out to cool bars I couldn’t legally get into. Once, I asked him why he didn’t just stay in and relax on Friday night and he just shrugged and said, “There are only so many Friday nights left.” 

That was always the type of person I wanted to be. At my best, it was the type of person I was. When I was dating him, it’s the type of person I was too anxious, too type A, too wound up to be. I was 20 and experiencing anxiety for the first real time. I knew, deep down, that I should have been in therapy. I knew that random weeks of paralyzing fear were not normal to have, but I also thought, well, if someone like this guy likes me, then maybe I’m actually not all the things I worry about being (ie: anxious, scared, lonely, etc.). I did this with all the men I dated, picking characters with traits I admired, that I thought filled in my own gaps. And I think that as much as I cared for them, I was more often than not clinging to the person I could be while dating them. 

I thought that maybe loving people makes you more than just you.

Obviously, I was wrong. In fact, this approach led to desperation and a sort of inability to separate myself from the men I dated. It led me to often disregard the reality of a situation, to some of the worst cases of “I can fix him” syndrome. And the healing from that process was like waking up from a hyper vivid dream and trying to remember what was real and what was not. It was losing not just a person you cared for, but what that person represented, what they could have been and what, I felt at the time, they should have been with more time, more care, and more magic. 

I’m not saying this to be cynical, or to imply that every feeling I’ve ever felt or shared was fake, far from it. I think the truth is those moments were deeply honest, deeply real, and, sure, there was some fundamental aspect of love in them. But I’m learning that magical moments can be just that: moments. And having strong connections with people doesn’t make them your soulmate. Just like how a man listening to the Smiths does NOT make him instantly interesting and deep (remember that ladies—that’s a big one). 

I think I’ll always be a romantic. I don’t think that part of me will ever go away, and I wouldn’t want it to. I’m proud of my capacity to love, even when it sucks. I am still happy for every intense, wreckless, stupid connection and choice I’ve made out of strong emotions. But I’m also learning that maybe explosive, wreckless, self-destroying love isn’t really the solution, ever. Imagine this: a healthy dose of both. An unheard of thought for me, but I’m getting there. 

So when my date texts me a day later and asks if he can make me dinner for the following week, I say yes, despite not loving him. And who knows, maybe I’ll fall in love with him and he’ll ruin my life, or maybe I’ll ruin his, or maybe he’ll burn down his kitchen Wednesday and kill us both, or maybe he’ll just be a nice memory with or without a magical moment, and that’s just fine by me. I’m working on being a hopeful romantic after all.