Maybe I Just Wanted To Be The Kind Of Person Who Could Have Loved You Forever

Maybe we aren’t Robin Scherbatsky and Ted Mosby.

Maybe our lives aren’t narrated by a laugh track and our happily-ever-after neatly aligned for us to stumble into by the end of season 8. Maybe our love isn’t a sitcom romance or TV trope.

Maybe we’re real people, with real hearts and minds and insecurities and plans. Plans that contradict one another, no matter how badly we want them not to.

Maybe there is no meant-to-be. Maybe we aren’t each other’s destinies. Maybe all of that is just a bunch of bullshit people make up when they’re not ready to let each other go.

Maybe we’ve both grown up feeding into bullshit – watching RomComs where affection conquers everything, where distance and time and incompatibility hold no weight when up against love.

Maybe we spent too long over-identifying with those main characters. Deciding that if people as indecisive and star-crossed as them could end up with a happily-ever-after, so could we.

We could bend and force each other into those molds – if we just tried hard enough, for long enough.

Maybe I wanted so badly to be the kind of person who could have loved you in the way you deserved, that I forgot that what you really deserved was someone who loving you came naturally to.

Someone who wouldn’t always struggle to put your relationship first. Someone who loved you in a way that was natural, easy, free. Someone whose values naturally lined up with yours, whose long-term visions were compatible with the ones you’d conceptualized alone.

Maybe there are no soul mates or loves-of-our-lives or forever people.

Maybe there are good fits and bad fits and that’s it. Maybe our insistence of anything otherwise was just a stretch at rationalizing something that didn’t work, for so many years.

Maybe there are times in our lives when we want so badly to be the kind of people that we’re not, that we will go to almost any lengths necessary to prove ourselves wrong.

Times when we’ll stretch ourselves thin. Sell ourselves short. Force and shove ourselves into boxes we just don’t fit into, because we want to be the kind of people who can fit a certain mold.

Maybe love is the ultimate motivation to do just that. Because it all seems so tragically romantic to be star-crossed in love when you’re watching it unfold on a TV screen or movie set. It seems possible to make almost anything work.

But in the real world, love isn’t always enough.

In the real world, you need compatibility. Commitment. Goals and values that align, without unbearable compromises on behalf of either party.

Maybe the thing about you and I is that when we were together, we got to pretend that we were already the people we wanted to be – the ones who were big enough, strong enough, brave enough, to choose love above whatever else we wanted.

Because it’s nice, for a little while, to live in the fantasy worlds that we construct.

The ones where we are surer, steadier, more emotionally stable. The worlds in which you and I weren’t people who wouldn’t constantly choose their dreams and plans and ambitions over one another.

But maybe those were never the people who we were meant to be – the ones who could have loved each other, properly, forever.

Maybe I just wanted to know that despite everything that came between us, some version of me, in some other Universe, could have loved you like that.

And hey, who knows.

Maybe, in some other Universe, she did.