Forever Alone | Chapter 1: Lonely & Longing (Part 2)
In which much is introduced, including why I think my singledom is my fault, all the couples I’ve shipped, my great-grandma’s take on erotic novels, and the age-old question: Are my hopes too high?
I published Forever Alone: One Introverted Millennial’s Half-Agonizing, Half-Hopeful Journey Through Singledom in 2021 as a 7-part podcast miniseries. I’m re-publishing it here on Substack for the first time in written form! Start reading from the beginning here.
So, because of allll that, I’ve always been somewhat baffled about how other people manage to move through life. Growing up, I’d go to a movie with friends and they’d leave saying, “That was cool!” and then proceed to never think about it again. While I, on the other hand, would stumble out in a feverish daze, wide-eyed and enchanted and already desperate to see it again.
Props to one of my best friends growing up, Carrie, who either had a touch of the drama herself, or was kind enough to indulge mine. I fondly recall seeing Spider-Man one summer night in 2002, and lying on the floor of Carrie’s parent’s office the next afternoon, groaning and hungover from our love of Tobey Maguire, punctuating our masochism with re-watches of the movie trailer.
And the next summer, after seeing Pirates of the Caribbean, we sat in my parents’ car absolutely blasting the soundtrack—which, I’ll remind you, was orchestral—pretending to play the strings and yelling at random, “He’s a pirate!!!”
Carrie had her limits though. That was the same summer she went to Florida with me on our family vacation, and the four kids—me, Carrie, my younger brother and his best friend—alternated between watching School of Rock and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones every night for a week. Every time we got to the secret wedding between Padme and Anakin at the very end, Carrie busted out laughing at Anakin’s fake golden hand, and how dumb it looked that Padme was reverently taking it in hers, and I would get mad at her for ruining the romance of it all.
But the first movie to make me nauseous with feels came long before that. I was only about 9 or 10 when I had my life absolutely wrecked by Titanic, which I watched with my friends at a sleepover. In hindsight, I’m surprised we got away with watching it—not exactly light fare for 10-year-olds. I remember lying on the couch, sobbing and sick to my stomach about Jack dying. Before, I’m sure I intellectually understood the concept of heartbreak. After, I felt it, man. How was I supposed to just … be normal after that?? Titanic came for my little heart so hard that it split my timeline into a “before” and an “after.” It was just so viscerally wrong that Rose had to keep on living for years and years without him. And then she went and married someone else?? No no no no no no NO.
And how could I, in good conscience, not mention Harry Potter? One of the best things my soul decided to do, if in fact souls decide ahead of time, is to be a kid in the 90s, so that I could be 11-years-old when I read Harry for the first time, and proceed to grow up with him over the next decade. The story of the books is enthralling, of course, but one of my favorite parts about reading them (and why I’ve reread them countless times) is because of how vivid the world is. I feel like I’ve sat in Gryffindor tower in front of the fire, doing homework with Harry, Ron, and Hermione. I’ve had butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks and snuck into the Forbidden Forest under cover of an invisibility cloak.
It was as real to me as anything in my actual life. Maybe more real, sometimes.
That’s a beautiful quality, I think—to have an inner world that’s so bold, vibrant, and imaginative that a story becomes much more than words on a page or scenes in a film. It means that I can look at life and see the potential for the dull and mundane to become shiny and meaningful. But … it can also get out of hand. The line between imaginative and delusional is somewhat tenuous, at times. When what’s going on in your head is more interesting and satisfying than what’s going on in the real world, you risk a lot of life passing you by.
But still, that danger never stopped me. Mostly because I didn’t start suspecting it was a problem for years and years. It was just how I felt, no thought needed.
No matter whether it was front and center or not, the part of every story I immediately glommed on to, like metal shavings drawn to a magnet, was the love story. I am an expert shipper—for those of you cool enough not to know, that means someone who’s invested in a romantic or sexual relationship between two characters.
Here’s a random selection of couples that tugged at my heartstrings, over the years, some of them casually and some very intensely. They range from the incredibly obscure to the completely on-the-nose:
Jack and Rose from Titanic, of course.
Harry and Ginny and Ron and Hermione, naturally.
Um, the foxes from the animated Robin Hood—don’t come at me, he was hot, OK?—and while we’re talking about animated creates we might as well throw Simba and Nala in there, too.
As a teen my friends and I were obsessed with Diego Luna and Romola Garai’s characters from Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, and we obviously watched The Notebook a million times and couldn’t get over Noah and Allie.
And since we talked about Star Wars, I’ve shipped something from every generation there: Padme & Anakin, Han & Leia, Ben & Rey.
I was a fan of T’Challa and Nakia from Black Panther (ugh, RIP Chadwick Boseman), and I was on board for Jon Snow and Daenerys, weird incest and all, until that ending.
I’m all about some Jamie and Claire from Outlander.
And it should go without saying, given Jane Austen is the patron saint of this podcast, that I’m a diehard fan of Lizzy and Mr. Darcy.
And, most recently, I loved David & Patrick from Schitt’s Creek and am currently very into Hades and Perspehone from Lore Olympus.
I also just binged Stranger Things for the first time and my heart cannot handle the purity of Mike and Eleven.
What can I say? If you ask me to ship something, I’m almost certainly going to follow instructions. I love love! But … why do I love love, exactly? When I say I want love, what exactly is it that I want?
Is that question too obvious? Or completely unnecessary? It’s love. Of course everybody wants it. We’re humans. What more is there to think about? But the thing is, I’m not sure I know how to answer that question with precision. At least not for myself.
Do I want love because my biology compels me? There are many other places to find real, lasting, deep love—with family, friends, pets—and I have that kind in abundance. But receiving that kind of love has never outweighed or made me forget my desire for romantic love. So, am I just craving a specific cocktail of hormones that only romantic love can provide? The oxytocin our brains dump into our system to encourage us to mate and further the species?
Or, is it companionship? As much as we might love our family and friends, we don’t usually live with them for a lifetime. People move away, our parents grow older and eventually pass on. Life would be really lonely without someone to share the highs and lows of the everyday—without a witness.
Is it the desire to create a new family of our own? Make brand new humans and nurture them and watch them grow, and learn from them in equal measure as we go? To carve out a unit where you undoubtedly belong. That, too, is a biological imperative. Whether you belong to a unit of two or an extended family of thirty, humans were designed to live in community with other people. As far as our brains are concerned, which haven’t advanced much since we were cave-people, isolation is akin to death. And we’ve proven now that prolonged loneliness is worse for your longevity than a pack-a-day smoking habit. We’re wired for connection, plain and simple, and we suffer physically, mentally, and emotionally when we don’t have it.
For me, it must be all of these things. My body reacts, without my say-so, very differently to a best friend than it does to a potential lover. Romantic love is an organic high, at least in the beginning. It’s just going to feel more intense and heightened. And I think it’s OK to crave that—again, we’re designed that way.
And I’ve always loved the idea of partnership—not just companionship, but partnership. I don’t want to just do life side-by-side with someone; I want to grow and thrive together. To feel seen and supported, and to see and support.
Going farther than we could alone because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—I think that’s beautiful.
There’s also something undoubtedly spiritual about romantic partnership. I don’t necessarily believe in the idea of a soulmate, in the traditional sense. I think we probably have many soulmates in our lifetime—family, friends, pets, children, and yes, romantic partners. But a summer fling could be a soulmate, just as much as a spouse of fifty years. The longevity of a relationship isn’t what makes it soulmate material. It’s more about what the two of you catalyze within the other; how you changed and grew as a result of the connection, however brief. The boyfriends I’ve had, though completely wrong for me as life partners, were definitely soulmates of a certain kind, considering how much I changed as a result of knowing them.
And, blame it on the fact that I’m a highly sensitive, Type 4, old soul and hopeless romantic, but one of the most appealing things about romantic love has always been that it lifts the mundane into the realm of the magical. The notion of meeting someone who your soul recognizes; who arrives in your life in some mysterious, but perfectly divinely appointed way—who’s also sexy—I mean, how am I supposed to say “meh, whatever” to that? To think that any random encounter at the grocery store, or some bland meeting on Zoom, could end up being a day where something like that happens … doesn’t that make life a little more worth living?
So, is that it? Can craving love be simplified to some combination of biology and divinity? We want it because our brains and bodies were designed for it, and our souls intended it?
That might be enough of an answer for “why I want love,” but it doesn’t satisfy my need to understand why I don’t want to be alone. What is it that we’re trying to get out of love, exactly, that we don’t get out of being by ourselves?
I ask that you now buckle up, because we’re going on what will to seem like a random tangent, but I think is at the heart of my question.
This was Chapter 1: Part 2 of Forever Alone. Read on for Part 3!