Skip to main content

A Modern Lover's Manifesto

Someone yesterday asked me what I wanted when it comes to all this love business.  I wrote the following.  It seemed like the kind of thing I'd want to hold on to.


I can tell you what I want, and then what would happen in some fantasy land version of the world.

I fret about things, about making people happy.  I want someone who I make happy by just being myself, someone I can be nice to.  Someone who will be nice to me.  Someone who I can look out for and they'll look out for me.  I want to be important to someone who I like enough that they're also important to me.  I want someone I can respect for their values, intelligence, ambition, and good sense.  I want someone to negotiate a life with.  I want someone who doesn't think their preferences are more important than mine and is therefore willing to explain their desires to me while also being willing to listen to what I want.  I want to have kids with someone.  I want them to be open to the idea of taking said children on amazing globe-hopping adventures.  It would make me very happy to have someone who would consider being a foster parent with me because I think people should live according to their values and I love children and there are lots of them who need love.  I want someone to talk about books and music with, someone who can teach me things but will take my recommendations seriously enough to check them out, even if they don't like them.  I want someone to grow with, someone to learn about, someone to learn about me.

It used to be easy to find people I wanted to spend time with because I just thought everyone was amazing and interesting.  I don't think that anymore, and sometimes that makes me sad, but I also think that I have a better idea about what I'm looking for, and that can't be a bad thing.  I used to look for someone who I thought had all these qualities that I admired that were so different from me, and then I realized that I want to be that person.  Someone who can fix things and make things and bake bread and go camping.  It would be nice to have someone to do some of those things with, but not all of them.  I'm not looking for another version of myself.  

Those are the things that matter to me.  In some sort of ideal world, I'd meet someone and just be swept away by them, by how amazing they are and they'd think I'm amazing and it would be so easy, but I'm a little tired of that rollercoaster if the truth be told.  You get swept away and then reality hits and it's never as good as you imagine it could be.  I want someone to love, not someone to fantasize about.  All of this is not to say that I don't want passion because I do.  I can't imagine being with someone who didn't make me tingle all over and feel nervous and challenge me and excite me.  Life would be so boring without that, but I think I'm past the point where that all by itself is enough.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thoughts from last Thursday: Tonight we set up our Indie Bits game, and I'm consumed by nervous anticipation. I imagine this is not unlike when your firstborn child goes to kindergarten. OK, maybe it's not that serious. But the feelings of, please don't bite anyone , and I hope you make friends translates roughly to please don't break while someone is playing you , and also please no one play this game because What if you don't like it?  What if people hate it? What if it doesn't work? What if it's uninteresting? What if the puzzles are too hard? There are so many ways this can go wrong. These are not feelings I typically experience with the things that I make, as I usually make things just for myself. I've always been more of an engineer then an artist. At middle school art camp, I was competent at various techniques, but I never had any great ideas. We would be set free to our own creative devices with a new method, and I sat there, feeling inad...
Post a Comment
Read more

2011 Reading Challenges

On the first day of this new year, I am pulling together the reading challenges in which I want to participate.  There are so many that sound interesting that I'm not doing, particularly a bunch of them that are regional authors, which I'm trying to cover with my Global Reading Challenge.  I've chosen a bunch of them, but the problem won't be reading quantity, but more like reading strategy.  I read 3 or 4 books a week and most of these challenges allow crossovers, so I see no problems reading enough books, merely reading the right books and then, perhaps more challenging, writing about them, which some challenges require, and some only suggest.  Either way, it's a neat way to prioritize reading for the coming year. The Challenges in Which I Shall Participate Southern Literature Challenge - I've never read enough Southern Lit, and while some of the newer stuff is truly awful, I'd like to explore some older books. It's any book set in the South by a S...
4 comments
Read more

2021 Reading Challenges

Apparently a blog is forever, since this one is still hanging out there. I could be using it to write about being a traveler, but that's been done and most of my thoughts should remain private anyway (they are *not* flattering). So I'm going to track my 2021 reading challenges instead because that's the only set of goals I'm really setting for myself this year. (2021 goal = have fewer goals.)  League of Extraordinary Penpals It's a secret! This challenge is part of a penpal group that I pay to be in, so they don't want people sharing the challenge. I'm going to try to figure out how to review and track these books here without sharing the challenge in ways that aren't okay.  For now, I'll just say that I'm tackling the Genre-tastic, Book Club, Around the World, Dewey Decimations, and Social Butterfly challenges, not all of which involve reading a book.  Current point tally 4/5/21: 150 5 Countries I'm in an Around the World group on Goodreads ...
Post a Comment
Read more