🖖🏻

*reluctant sigh*

*scrolls back up*

You and this perfect person who you’ve never met before, to come out of nowhere, fit your life perfectly, complete you and make you whole for the first time in your life, much like your mother did for me.”

And even though what he said sounds sweet or whatever, what it manifested in my seven-year-old brain was this, “If you are not with someone, you are broken. If you are not with someone, you are incomplete. If you are not with someone, you are not whole.”

And that’s not just something my dad made me feel, that’s something that we as a society have made every single child born in the last 40 years feel. Every Disney princess has a prince, every prince has a princess, every television show or movie always has a character in it that doesn’t want to be in a relationship. They’re happy with who they are. But then by the end of the series, guess what. They were wrong! They were wrong for wanting to be alone, what a fucking idiot. Everyone needs someone, yeah. It’s all to do with love.

And when you raise children in that world, where everything points towards love, when you’ve raised them for 18 fucking years, when we become an adult for the first time in our late teens and our early 20s, we’re so terrified. We’re so trying to be an adult that some of us will take the wrong person, the wrong jigsaw piece, and just fucking jam them into our jigsaws anyway, denying that they clearly don’t fit. I’m gonna force this fucking person into our lives, because we’d much rather have something than nothing.

Then five years later, you’re stood looking at a jigsaw you don’t recognize, being like, “Ah! There’s a fucking cunt in the middle of this.” And in that moment you have a very, very difficult question to ask yourself. Do I admit the last five years of my life have been a waste? Do I waste the rest of my life?

My generation has become so obsessed with starting the rest of their lives that they’re willing to give up the one they are currently living. We have romanticized the idea of romance, and it is cancerous. People are more in love with the idea of love than the person they are with. The worst thing you can do with your life is spend it with the wrong human being.