Is it Possible to Miss Someone You Haven’t Met?
The Fray, Forever Alone, and a Forever Person
Editors Note: I am occasionally going to post some of my partner’s writings here, which she made especially easy in this case since this is essentially Jake propaganda.
Sheila, a smart, confident, black woman with a Halle Berry haircut, says the most profound thing I’ve heard in 10 seasons of this miserable show:
“I spent my whole 20s trying to convince men I’m worthy. I’m not going to sit here and try to convince my husband of that. You should already think so.”
The husband, for context, is a man she met for the first time at the altar. The show is called Married At First Sight, and it is a complete shitshow, although there are some very strange Christian undertones, a team of experts that includes a pastor (audience favorite Pastor Cal), and an uplifting theme song of: “No holding back! No holding back!”
My own husband, my Forever Person, is the funniest person I know. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a relevant one is his idea for a live version of Married at First Sight, where the show plays on a giant screen in an outdoor amphitheater like Wolf Trap, and a classically trained symphony performs the soundtrack live—mischievous music when one of the husbands is saying something dumb, sentimental music when the experts of the show force the contestants to look at their wedding album. Multiple people play a giant drum for the theme song, and a gospel choir comes together, singing what sounds like marriage propaganda hypnosis: “It’s not a bad thing! It’s not a bad thing!”
“That’s some deep shit,” I say to my husband of Sheila’s assessment. “I feel that.”
I have never had to convince my husband of my worth. In fact, in the first years of our friendship, I set about trying to do the opposite. “I hate almost everyone I meet,” I confided in him on one of our nightly runs that we went on as friends and roommates. This was intended to shock him, but instead, he started doing an accent and quoting a similar line from There Will Be Blood.
In the time before I’d found my Forever Person, convincing men of my worth was the name of the game. If I could just come through in the right set of circumstances, I’d finally convince someone I liked to like me back. Since the right set of circumstances never came, I spiraled into a self-hating depression, where I often got too drunk just to make things interesting, or holed up in a singular library carrel all day, listening to the same songs until I cried, embodying a meme that didn’t exist yet: forever alone.
Pastor Calvin Roberson-Approved Boys
I went through all college desperate to find my Forever Person. I started to worry--not that he didn’t exist, but that he did and I didn’t deserve him.
The song “Fix You,” just came out, and I was on a mission to find a man as boring as a Coldplay album.
If I could just find him—a sweater vested, mother-loving, intellectual—maybe I could become a little smarter myself. Maybe I could start loving my own mother more.
I swung and I missed, again and again. At first, I thought, I just needed to get this type of guy drunk and then he could see how much fun a girl like me could be. I wanted to be someone’s first blonde after a long line of brunettes.
This ended in many scenes. The one that makes me cringe the most is me banging my arms on the window of the Honors Dorm, hollering after two brainy, virginal guys whose names and personalities were almost interchangeable: “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” Luckily, they were fast asleep and my roommates quietly whisked me away, as they were growing used to doing.
Then I went for the opposite approach. If only these guys could witness me in a serious situation, then maybe they could take me seriously, too. I took the same classes as them and invited them to study with me. I went to church with them. For the amount of time we spent together, the fact that they had zero romantic interest in me was equal parts frustrating and mind-blowing.
I spent long hours contemplating my loneliness in the McGregor Room of the Alderman Library, lovingly referred to by the dorks I went to school with as the Harry Potter room. Maybe if I was better, if I was the right kind of person, I thought, I would like things like Harry Potter, wholesome things that were put on this earth for good humans to like. But I was a bad human.
My headphones were pumping in nice-guy, hospital drama soundtrack band The Fray, crooning the words, “Heaven forbid you end up alone and you don’t know why.”
Unfortunately, I did know why. To put it in a fairly Victorian way, I was already ruined.
There is a Band Called Travis and They Aren’t Country
It might not be in the exact way my mom had summarized it when it didn’t work out with the curly haired boy who made me the mix CD I stayed up all night listening to, the boy who made me feel alive by telling me to close my eyes, point my finger somewhere on the map of the downtown mall to pick out where we’d eat lunch.
She’d said: I don’t really think it makes sense for someone who isn’t a virgin to date someone who is.
This would have tragically wiped out the entire category of boy I intended to marry. But it wasn’t like I was a man. I could teach myself to ignore sex for a couple of years while passionately kissing boys and telling them I loved them. That could be enough for me.
Rather than what my mom had said, there seemed to be another reason I was cosmically fucked. It had to be karma.
My high school boyfriend burned me a CD with the song “Why Does It Always Rain On Me?” By a forgettable 90s band called Travis. The song posits like a curse: “Is it because I lied when I was 17?”
This unreal miracle of a high school boyfriend had his own car and brought me roses every time we went on a date. He came over to my house every Thursday with a Starbucks Frappuccino and Trolli Brite Crawlers to watch The OC. He made me a website that I’ve since spent hours on the WayBack Machine trying to recover, where my senior photo flashed across the screen with skinny hearts he’d designed on Adobe Illustrator, my favorite songs playing dramatically in the background.
Even at the time he must have known I wasn’t worthy.
I think we broke up five times in total, and even when it was finally over for real, I still pulled shit like messaging him about the house he just bought, driving two hours to said new house in the middle of the night, drinking a beer in his brand new kitchen and adding my bottle cap to the collection magnetized to the stainless steel fridge, then waking up hours before my morning class and driving back, pretending none of it ever happened.
I’m Not the Kind of Girl You Take Home
I could take things back even further to elementary school. I remember hearing Sheryl Crow on the radio sing: “I’m not the kind of girl you take home,” and feeling like this was already true of my 10-year-old self.
Later as a yearbook teacher, I hated the senior superlative “Best to Take Home to Parents.” I found it insulting for some reason. Like why is this necessarily a good thing? Parents sucked. If anything, didn’t this mean you possessed the art of conning adults? Or worse, that you were such a boring person, you were the kind of person someone’s mom and dad would actually like?
I never was the kind of person who could please someone else’s mom and dad (or my own, for that matter). Even in elementary and middle school, I got the idea about myself that I was frivolous, vapid, and maybe a little bit slutty. This was because of the way I wanted to dress, which was based on style inspo from music video dancers (which, by the way, was the future career I chose in middle school for my I-Search paper).
In short, for much of my youth, I saw myself as a preteen party girl. A good-time girl. Not marriage material.
Somewhere Out There
But even during my darkest times, I saw glimmers of my Forever Person, every now and again. I knew they had to be out there.
The funny guy working on the student newspaper with me, who, when I did a shoddy cutout of a local war veteran’s head, told me I was messing him up more than the war had.
The freshman who said he wanted to go back to his dorm, smoke some fatties and watch Indiana Jones.
The chubby guy sitting on a keg in the dark, whose eyes lit up as he sang to us a la Avril Lavigne: “I’m sittin on a keg...I’m waitin in the dark...”
My real Forever Person, unknown and two hours away, making a YouTube documentary about his friends trying to chug a gallon of milk in an hour.
International House of Pain
As it sometimes happens, you find someone who you think might be your Forever Person, but then you quickly realize they are not and you both kind of get stuck. They become a Four Year Person.
You go have a sad, hungover, gluttonous meal together at IHOP. In fact, since you spend 24 hours a day together, but it’s never that good, your whole life starts to feel like IHOP.
You see a sad old woman eating alone and it moves you to tears. Despite your current relationship status, this is how you see your inevitable future. The Fray starts inexplicably playing in your ears once again.
You tell your Four Year Person that this is the saddest thing, that you see your future self in this woman.
He disagrees with your assessment. “I bet she has a husband,” he says, thinking this will cheer you up. “They probably had a fight this morning, and she went off to have a nice breakfast without him.”
This, perhaps, was a more accurate extrapolation of your future together.
Love Song for No One
Do I believe in soulmates? Not exactly. But I can only explain all of the sadness and rage of my former loneliness this way: I was missing someone I hadn’t met yet.
Soulmates or not, stars aligning or not, I have a vivid memory of receiving the first correspondence from my Forever Person while I was in the middle of teaching a creative writing class to 3rd and 4th graders in Ashburn. I remember getting in my car and driving through construction around the airport on Route 28. I remember staring at the chubby traffic cones, orange and white and orange again, and honestly thinking: I am going to marry this person.
And while I feel for Sheila, and while I trust the experts—especially Calvin Roberson—I’m worried that this won’t work out. And that she’ll enter her 30s feeling the same way she felt in her 20s: unworthy.
Because it took me most of my life to convince myself I could even deserve a Forever Person. But here he is, as real as ever, enthusiastically air drumming to the Married At First Sight theme song on the couch right next to me.