Review Summary: It’s not all good, you know.
They only ever show you the good stuff; the laughs, the kisses, the fingers through your hair as you lie holding each other on a sunlit couch. You will get the happy ending, they tell you, or at least they make you believe, even on a subconscious level, that there even is such a thing. Have this, they say, and you will find your purpose. Have this, and you will be complete.
No, no one ever tells you about the pain that comes with it, too. Perhaps it’s because they believe that something must be wrong, something must be amiss, if they found all they ever wanted, only to discover that all that everything is, in fact, really
everything. No one is coming to save us. No one is coming to pull us out of the rut. No one is coming to mend the parts of us that were broken so long ago that we’ve forgotten they are even broken at all. They’re just a person, like you, looking for their own salvation. And you wonder how they can look to you to save them when you can’t even save yourself. There must be something severely wrong with them, you think, if they can look at
you and see their redeemer.
So you start to listen to those doubts, the ones that tell you that this isn’t right, that this isn’t how it’s meant to be. Some break it off immediately; it was just intuition, they say, as they run off to find the next one, the better one, the one who will finally roll the credits on their story. Others suffer through the pain, fighting themselves in a never-ending back-and-forth. Eventually they grow weary and give in, telling themselves they’re one of the unlucky few who just aren’t meant to have that kind of closure, that their story must go on… and on… and on. They grow bitter, resenting the fact that they stayed with someone who never promised them anything in the first place. The perfect one is out there, they tell themselves… but I’ll never meet them.
We’re not looking for love; at least not in the way it really is. We’re looking for someone who is
easy to love; someone who can’t let us down, someone who always has and will be perfect in every way because, if they’re not, it means that they aren’t capable of giving us the closure we long for. They might let us down. They might hurt us even more. They might shatter our illusions about the way life is meant to go. Even worse, they might do none of those things; they might just be people, like us, looking to keep their heads above water.
It’s not all good, you know. But maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t need to be.
