When you’re falling in love

They don’t tell you that when you’re falling in love, you will be late to work every morning. Prepare for it. You’ll also forget every single item that’s on your calendar, no matter how long you’ve been preparing for it. You’ll forget that you promised your best friend you’d go to brunch on Sunday. You’ll forget you told your parents you’d be by for dinner. You’ll forget you arranged to have someone come over to fix your kitchen sink on Friday afternoon. You’ll forget your nephews’ birthdays.

When you’re falling in love, your conversations will become very boring because all you can talk about is the object of your affections.

You will pore over every little detail of the person you’re infatuated with, at all times, out loud, or in your own head, whether they’re with you or not. It will be the only thing you can think of.

You’ll go over his Facebook page until you get to the very bottom of his feed. When he’s not around to talk to or send text messages to, you’ll just re-read your text or Facebook messenger or Google Hangouts conversation up to that point.

You will be tickled with everything about him.

You will love the way he says, “You’re welcs” instead of “You’re welcome”.

You will love the way he squints his eyes and sucks on his teeth when he’s thinking of an answer to your most recent question.

You will love the faces he makes when he’s dancing.

You will love the freckles on his forehead. You will love how he looks in blue jeans.

You will love sending him songs you know on YouTube. You will make him playlists on Spotify.

You will come up with reasons to see him again, somehow. Lunch today? Would you like to come on my afternoon run with me? Would you like to come over while I fold my laundry? Can I come over while you fold yours?

You will feel a rush when he asks when he can see you again.

When you’re falling in love, you will imbue meaning in the utterly meaningless and mundane. You will find patterns in the freckles on his arms. You will have dreams about him that will make or break your day. You will find yourself seeing his favorite color (blue) everywhere (the sky). You’ll hear his favorite song on the radio at every grocery store you wander into. Or you won’t, because he listens to such obscure music. And that will also be a sign for you.

You won’t be able to imagine a day when he’s not turned on just by looking at you, or when thinking about him doesn’t make you melt somewhere between your legs.

You’ll make plans. Small, feasible plans — tonight I’ll wear that dress he likes. Bigger, still feasible plans — sometime this week I’ll take him out to that restaurant in the casino and buy him $100 worth of chips to play black jack all night. Even bigger, yet still feasible plans — in three weeks we’ll go to Las Vegas. Even bigger, pipe dream plans — we’ll go to Europe together for a few weeks. And then the biggest plans with the least likelihood of coming true — picket fences and children you name, summer homes, wedding venues. It will all be gut reaction; you won’t notice you’re making the plans until you find yourself looking up flight prices online or staring at slideshows of designer wedding dresses. You don’t even like wedding dresses.

You’ll have love songs by pop artists on repeat in your car and your home. Songs you couldn’t stand a month ago for their saccharine nonsense but that now make perfect sense to your hungry mind will play over, and over, and over.

When you’re falling in love, you won’t care what anyone else thinks of him. You won’t care if your friends think he’s weird, or funny, or smart, or dumb. You’ll overlook the tiniest hint of flaws.

When you’re falling in love, you will refuse to even publish the blog post you’re writing about it, because you know, you know, you know there’s going to be a turn in here about three months in when the other shoe has dropped and he loses his magic for you and you lose your magic for him, all in one go. You’ll remember in your bones if not your head or your heart that falling out of love is inevitable and miserable. You will wish that you hadn’t shared so much of your soul with him. When you’re falling out of love, looking at the things you shared with him (your favorite kind of flowers; the music you listen to when you want to feel young again; how you are when you’re sad) will make you feel ashamed and will burn you like a branding iron. You’ll be freshly wounded just thinking about dancing, because you liked how he looked when he danced. You’ll hate every joke he ever told that you laughed at. You’ll see every single one of your flaws and wonder why you have so many that make you so unacceptable to someone you felt so strongly towards.

But when you’re falling in love, you don’t want to lose that magic. You press blissfully forward into the abyss of nothingness that is falling in love. Even though you know that the reasons you were unsuited toward a relationship a month ago are just as true now as they were before you met this person. Even though you know that changing the object does not change what’s wrong with the subject.

And when you’re falling out of love, you’ll read this post about falling in love and wish you’d never let yourself do it again. It won’t be a balm against your hurt. It will just make everything worse.