Love me, but not too much. Leave me alone, but not too much.

The first time I fell in love was with my highschool sweetheart. I remember going to his grandma’s house and talking about our future plans as if we had already decided to get married. His grandma liked me plenty, but responded in disbelief

“You know you’re not going to be together past high school, right?”

I got defensive, but she was right. I broke up with him in eleventh grade and both of us moved on fairly quickly. I didn’t really process the breakup much because I immediately ended up in another relationship. This time, the person told me he wanted to get married within a month of us dating. We broke up because he was sleeping with other people, which wasn’t really my thing at the time.

The whirlwind of that second relationship made me obsess over everything I could do to get him to treat me better. The further that he pulled away, the more room I had to imagine what it would like for him to be closer. It didn’t play out well.

The last time I fell in love was with my last longterm partner. We were together for almost 6 years, we moved in together and were extremely settled down. Yet, the closer and more settled down we became, the more our sex life tamed and the time we spent together felt like the default rather than something exciting.

We broke up when I got too focussed on my career and my mental health was in bad shape. I don’t regret this, but he was my best friend for a long time and I regret the way I treated him.

Now, single for about three years, the contradictory nature of finding love in my life becomes so much more evident. While my ambition tends to be mostly self-involved, I find that I too-frequently project myself into fantasies of who I can be to someone, or with someone. These fantasies become particularly potent when someone feels distant for any reason — they don’t check their phone as often as I do, we have conflicting schedules, etc.

Yet, the moment that someone seems to have a desire to be close to me, I tend to lose interest. It’s not that I am uninterested in a relationship right now, it’s that I haven’t had the space to fantasize about some form of idyllic version with it. Without any thought of what the relationship could be, I feel like there’s nothing to reach for.

I crave emotional intimacy. In fact, I would say that I’m greedy for it. I quickly build extremely intimate relationships with my platonic friends. Intimacy that I would love to have exist in a romantic relationship, but that I’m afraid of losing by pursuing anything with any of said friends.

I was talking with a close friend the other day, however, about how I never really fantasize about closeness with Tinder dates. Perhaps I’m tired, and maybe go on too many of them out of boredom and…horniness. Perhaps the profiles I’m attracted to don’t end up being the type of people I should be spending time with. My desire for emotional intimacy is rare and fleeting when it comes to these people.

As such, my physical life and emotional life are incongruous in ways that I’m not entirely sure I’ve experienced before. They both ebb and flow — intersecting in rare and amazing ways.

In the cases that they do connect, it’s difficult to create space for separateness. It’s also difficult to create space in a busy schedule for togetherness.

I think that collectively in the modern, Western world — filled with dating apps and romance blogs, our notion of closeness sometimes implies a reduction in freedom and independence. But, I’ve learned that while repetition and familiarity builds intimacy, intimacy can impede desire. Too much togetherness leaves nothing to aspire to. Too much separateness leaves us with no connection.

Balancing these two things for a healthy relationship is hard. But, I’m coming to learn that perhaps it’s one of the most necessary things in building something amazing. These paradoxes will never part from my nature, and so I will learn to relish them.

I want to learn to appreciate the frustration I feel when the person I want attention from can’t offer it to me. I want to learn to feel comfortable in repetition and familiarity. Perhaps I simply don’t have the patience for Tinder dates. Perhaps I need to learn to stop texting so fucking much. Perhaps I need to stop overthinking everything. But most of all, I need and want to learn to love with my best self, in the capacities that I can.