Eternal companionship is not a goal, it’s a threat.
I waste a preposterous amount of time preoccupied with the idea of love, dating, relationships, and the general concept of romantic companionship eternal until the sun burns out.
Anyone who knows anything about me can tell you this. Someone who is an acquaintance of an acquaintance could tell you this. A stranger could tell you this, purely from the observation of frenzied desire glinting in my eyes within a limited interaction. It’s an obsession so intense that even someone three degrees removed from me in social circles or a passerby catching the briefest glimpse of my wistful stare might suspect that I’m plotting to steal their divorced parent for a date.
In an age dominated with the social aspirations of self-sufficiency as an attractive quality vis-à-vis relationships and polyamory as an attractive needs-based arrangement, it’s a detrimental faux pas for a person to admit their absorption with love outright. Openly confessing a deep-seated preoccupation with romance is akin to admitting you still believe in the tooth fairy. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. It’s needy. It’s repulsive. It’s disgusting, because the decided suspicion is that when someone concerns themselves with such overwhelming sentiments, they do so because they want it from anyone. Because anyone will do, and anyone includes you.
This common misperception assumes that those of us infected with the plague of singledom are indiscriminate in our affections; that any warm body will do. This, however, is far from the truth. The reality is that nobody wants you, and yes, that includes the person you’re currently lying to yourself about being able to tolerate your presence for a lifetime. You will be buying meals for one for the rest of your days. Whether this revelation is a comfort or a crisis is for you to decide.
Despite my preoccupation with cupidity, my historical record of deflecting relationships, sexual partners, intimate moments, and almost-kisses could best be described as an expert class in evasion. I dodge potential suitors like a seasoned matador, agilely sidestepping advances and almost-kisses as if they were live grenades being liberally discharged at me from behind enemy lines in a twisted act of affectionate warfare. I am rapidly tap-dancing away as a machine gun shoots bullets made of potential suitors at my feet, while at any given moment being absolutely and utterly petrified that I will leave this earth without a chosen companion loving me as I exhale my last breath with the most amount of cinematic inflection.
What a problem to have. What an inconvenience to suffer from. What a cross to be nailed to.
It was more than a cross, though; it was the weight of my eternal exaltation encumbered upon my soul, like the planet installed on the back of Atlas after he had a little too much to drink before administrating the Titanomachy.
In being raised within the aching heart of Utah, The Promised Land, religious authority figures hammered into the minds of wide-eyed babes that in order to meet the qualifications required to live with our earthly family members and receive the fullness of joy distributed by God and Christ, we could only be spiritually whole once we were found worthy to enter the gates of heaven via Saint Peter after having lived a righteous life and found a partner to marry.
If we could not find a partner in life, one would be assigned to us after death.
This horrified me on a cosmic level.
What if, in the event of my failure to procure a suitable partner in the corporeal plane, I were to be spiritually paired with someone who chewed with their mouth open? Worse, what if they did it while eating pineapple pizza? What if they hated dogs? What if they wore sandals or cargo shorts? What if they thought Raiders of the Lost Ark was “just okay”?
With this revelation, a celestial emergency of the highest proportions had been manufactured in my mind. It sent me into a life-long state of debilitating panic. And despite having long since resigned from the the snake oil IV drip peddled by the Mormon church, the monumental dread in understanding that I was not only responsible to choose a partner but The Perfect Partner™, one who could quite literally stand the test of time in order to receive the fullness of happiness that I deserved, was cemented into my brain. The threat of being assigned a divinely righteous Jar Jar Binks for a spouse in the metaphysical world because you failed to find someone who can even remotely stand being around you in the material one is too great an imminent punishment for anyone to sensibly ignore.
So there the fear has remained, crippling my common sense like a vice and guiding my fumbling plays in the field like a coach barking orders in the rain at their dispirited team during the last quarter of a rival match over my eternal happiness.
“Have you ever thought about therapy?” a friend has gently nudged once or twice.
I have, of course. But writing is cheaper.