There was a time when my relationship made me miserable. I don’t really understand romantic relationships. For one, it seems like they are supposed to preoccupy most of our lives. By most, I mean most of the time in our lives. Now, there was a time when I was obsessed by Romance, literally obsessed, spending every waking hour of every day steeped in it. Living with me must be like living with a time bomb. The central thing was that you had no control over any of it. It just happened. A good example would be every time I waited for a boy to reply to my text. I also like how these fairy-tale stories involved Disney men. I was waiting to be subsumed by another. I was waiting for someone to complete me— that delicious, tangy over-take of feelings. That’s co-dependency. There was a time when my relationship made me miserable. I don’t really understand romantic relationships. For one, it seems like they are supposed to preoccupy most of our lives. By most, I mean most of the time in our lives. Now, there was a time when I was obsessed by Romance, literally obsessed, spending every waking hour of every day steeped in it. Living with me must be like living with a time bomb. The central thing was that you had no control over any of it. It just happened. A good example would be every time I waited for a boy to reply to my text. I also like how these fairy-tale stories involved Disney men. I was waiting to be subsumed by another. I was waiting for someone to complete me— that delicious, tangy over-take of feelings. That co-dependency. That over-take. But these feelings kinda themselves evaporated recently because I realised that romance was not that important to me. I hated the days when I was stewing in a corner because of some failed romantic project. And those projects always came with price tags attached. I’ve realised that that was when I was more attached to my own romantic ego rather than what was true and fulfilling. I finally understood something— it was almost always after the fact that something would be good, but during the experience I invariably hated it. I thought I had to perform something, and it wasn’t my own authentic self at all. But surely the actual authentic thing about relationships is after the fact, when things aren’t exciting anymore, when there is no kazoom left. The idea you’re just there to guard over someone, this monolith that you had created, but not actually let the thing flow outwards. What flows outwards is totally something you can’t control, it’s a bit like “wearing your heart on the outside”. That feeling that you can’t ever take anything for granted, because it can explode in the next moment. I think that that is what I have learned.