Are The Stories All Wrong?

Opening up about my search for true love in an imperfect world

Artwork by Jule Schmidt

Part 1: True Love

I wake up and make my way to the deck of our ship. I’m greeted by sensations which have become all too familiar over the last 10 years: the smell of saltwater, a constant breeze, a strong sun, and the general clamor of the crew.

This morning, however, these sights and sounds are subtly different from what I’m used to. The sunlight is just a bit more golden, the breeze more humid and warm, and the smell carries more than merely salt and water. But most marked of all is the energy of the crew: voices are raised louder in excitement, and movements are carried out with a fervor I haven’t seen in months.

Within an hour we’re gliding along parallel to the thickly wooded shore, the strong coastal wind propelling our ship northward—toward civilization, and toward home. Slowly I begin to pick out familiar landmarks, until we round the final bend and I see it for the first time since we began our 10-year voyage: my kingdom.

A wide bay opens up before us, atop which is situated a massive city. Busy harbor streets fade into terraced hills which rise higher and higher, eventually turning into mountains and culminating in a castle so magnificent I still have trouble believing it’s real. This is my city, and it is alive.

But as wonderful as this place is, I would trade it all in a second for my most valuable treasure in this world—and though I’ve just spent a whole paragraph describing my kingdom to you, it barely even graces my thoughts as my mind forms her image in anticipation.

We had our first kiss in the warm waters of the Indian ocean, with a full moon almost as bright as the sun beaming ethereal white light down upon our salty skin. We were married in the great hall of my castle in a celebration without equal. And yet, special as these moments and places are to me, the happiness of their memory is but a shadow compared to that which we find anew, every day that we’re alive and together.

For when we talk, and when we make love, we do so with real intention. And in both of these actions (which are really not so different from one another when each is performed for the right reasons) we discover the new and the wonderful. The material world fades, and the words of our mouths and the movements of our bodies take us places that are undiscovered to us both—how we find them, I’m not entirely sure.

From the moment she came into my world, I’ve known true happiness—for she is the companion I’ve searched for my entire life. In both physical form and in temperament, she is utterly perfect. Even the expected mandatory marital sacrifices, such as quelling the desire for other women in order to remain faithful to my promise, are totally foreign procedures to me—bizarre, irrelevant rituals—for I really and truly desire no other, and I know I never will.

And now as the ship nears the dock, I see her. Though there are throngs of people clustered at the water’s edge awaiting our return, there is no mistaking my wife, my queen—if you saw her, you’d know what I mean.

Our eyes meet for the first time in 10 years, and everything else fades. A million shared thoughts are exchanged in the space of that first moment of eye contact. There is no one else around. No sounds, no city, no ship, no dock—only us. She’s even more wonderful than I remember, and the thousands of memories and scenarios I’d thought up and played out during the countless lonely nights at sea fall laughably short.

There is perfect trust in those eyes, and I know she sees the same in mine. For all these 10 years, she’s waited for me, never once doubting or leaving or searching for love elsewhere. I know this just as I know water is wet and the sky is blue. And in this moment, as the ship comes to a halt and our eyes remain locked onto each other, I have the answer to that old king’s question, “Would you rather be feared or loved?” Fear is not necessary when love is all. And now it also becomes obvious to me that the peace and prosperity of our kingdom is no accident, for the essence of our bond is of such purity and strength that it emanates outward from our castle, sowing all manner of good things in the hearts of our people.

My throat hurts, and tears fill my eyes as I step off the gangway and approach her. Where others search for love and never find it, or search and settle for the wrong person, I have found true, happy-ending, storybook love. A love that has only grown stronger after 10 years of separation. A love that makes life itself feel like dreaming.

And with that word, “dreaming,” my wife—the single most important person in my entire life, whose every thought and movement I know intimately, with whom I’ve shared a lifetime of memories, and whose arms are even now reaching out to embrace me—herself fades into my memory, as a new, and yet dreadfully familiar remembrance rises up from the depths and digs in its fangs, dissolving reality itself around me.

I wake up—for real, this time. I sigh and reach over, grabbing my phone to check what time it is.

---

Part 2: The Disparity

I want to apologize for beginning this piece in such a cliche manner. If I was doing the reading rather than the writing, I’d probably be rolling my eyes right along with you.

But I didn’t really have much of a choice, since this post was inspired by many such experiences exactly like the one recounted above: being in love with a person in such a full, deep, and meaningful way, only to wake up and realize it was all fake. How could something that felt so real—in a way, even more real and meaningful than the waking world—just be all in my head? And I felt the best way to get that feeling across in a written piece was to pull the exact same trick on you, the reader. So that’s what I did, and I think you’d probably have done the same if you were me.

My search for love in the real world has been a tortured one, in no small part due to my own stubborn romanticism. As I grew older and wiser, and started and ended relationships, I began to notice a stark contrast between the way love is depicted in art and media—and, indeed, in my own dreams—and the way love actually seems to play out in the real world.

In these fictional creations of our human species, we see the common theme of love that can move mountains. We see strong, courageous men beat back evil and face danger in ways that seem superhuman, all to save the woman they love most in the world. And we see unspeakably beautiful, faithful women similarly defy the odds set before them in order to reunite with their true lovers.

Curiously though, most people seem capable of witnessing these kinds of stories on the big screen at the movie theater, or in the pages of their most recent bookstore find, only to box it up neatly in some sort of partitioned “entertainment center” of their brains and carry absolutely none of it over into their actual lives. “It’s just the movies,” these people say. “Yeah, Braveheart was cool and everything, but I gotta get to the office at 8 a.m. tomorrow—what’s it got to do with me?”

I’m not like that. The entertainment center of my brain is not partitioned, and the things I see in movies, the things I read in books, and especially the things I experience in my own dreams, flow like a waterfall right into my personal life, affecting everything from what I’m going to eat for breakfast to what I decide to do with the next year of my life. Like I said, I’m a stubborn romantic.

But the truth is, after a diet of Hollywood movies and bestselling novels, things like marriage, and love in general, often fall depressingly flat in real life. I myself have ended meaningful relationships with women over such mundane concerns as:

• “Can I do better?”

• “Do we really get each other?”

• “Isn’t is supposed to feel better than this?”

If this makes me sound like a terrible person… I won’t defend myself. Maybe I am.

But it’s not all that unreasonable for me to point out that love in the real world is often vapid at best—that very fact is acted out in front my face every single day. Listen to the way most husbands and wives speak to each other, how willing they are to sacrifice for each other, or how faithful they really are when temptation comes.

Couple all this with my vivid dreams—which plunge me firsthand into love stories of such gravity and scale that even Hollywood falls flat in comparison—and you have the bulk of what inspired me to write this piece.

---

Part 3: Dig In, Or Surrender?

Right now, I feel a resolution. Perhaps this is just a vestige of childlike romanticism that will disappear with another decade of life, but even as I sit here writing this, in a little outdoor patio in southern California, I can’t help but feel this resolution—is it anger, passion, foreseen regret?—to never settle for a love that’s less than what it could be, to never end up just another fat, boring husband with the wonder for life drained out of him, returning home from work and immediately gluing himself to a couch, choosing a TV screen and a beer over the deep, wanting eyes of his wife.

I want get home from work after 25 years of marriage and still feel butterflies in my chest at the thought of seeing my wife—my lover—and then lose some of the breath in my lungs when I realize how beautiful she still looks, even though she’s now the single most familiar person in my entire life.

I want to talk theology, philosophy and history with my good friends only occasionally, because I talk about them with my wife every single day—and in fact, I’m the one who has to put an end to the debate or the discussion because she’s even more fascinated by all these things than I am (not to mention better at understanding them).

I don’t want to spend a single night’s sleep on different sides of the bed. I want to wake up every morning with her nestled into my side, skin-on-skin, and who the hell cares if we get too hot or can’t sleep properly that way—aren’t we in love?

But at other times, I feel a surrender as well—and I’m sure you, reader, will be able to identify with that part, for better or for worse. I mean, what about just after an ugly breakup with the person you thought you’d spend forever with—no, that person whom you were absolutely certain was finally the one you’d spend forever with? There’s that awful nagging voice, which I myself have heard many times, that insists you’ll never find someone. You’re destined to be alone, and the best you can do is find love vicariously through your dreams or the experiences of others. In these moments, entertaining such high thoughts as “never settling” is like singing your own funeral dirge.

As I write this now, I’m 27. Just a few more years of this and I’ll be in my thirties, with no true love to show for it—and at that point, won’t my pool of options be growing dangerously small?

Or maybe my standards really are just far too high. Maybe there’s a good reason why most marriages seem ordinary and stale when viewed from the outside. Why should I pretend it’s even possible for me to find anything different?

But a decade of turning these questions over and over in my mind has convinced me that there is a path forward through this wilderness. I’m hesitant to say that it requires compromise, since not compromising is quite literally the entire point of this piece—but it does require patience, a subtle shift in perspective, and above all, some careful balance.

---

Part 4: The Way Forward

First, if you think that the magic you read about in books or watch on the big screen is entirely divorced from the “more boring” real world, then I regret to inform you that you simply do not know history—or even current events.

Have you ever tried to write a book, or a screenplay? I have. You know what inevitably happens, try as you might to avoid it? The story always ends up modeled, to some extent, after real events and real people you know from your own life.

My point is that real life came first, and stories came second. And that means that, pretty much without exception, the most remarkable fictional love story ever penned, or the most glorious dream you’ve ever had, will have its equal somewhere in the annals of history.

I could take you through the famous stories: William Wallace liberating Scotland, Cleopatra falling in love with Mark Antony, or even Stanislav Petrov singlehandedly saving the world from a nuclear holocaust. Yes, these all really happened—and I bet if they were written down in a fictional story, we’d be sitting here talking about them and wondering why real life seems bland in comparison.

But I prefer to think about the lost people of history. The untold millions whose names we’ll never know—whose only legacy is a little broken piece of a letter back home, or a black and white portrait with no words or context clues to be found. I promise you that hundreds, if not thousands, of these people lived utterly remarkable lives beyond your wildest imaginings. They were separated from their lovers for decades and finally reunited in perfect faithfulness. They really did fall in love at first sight and never looked back. They made the impossible choice to sacrifice themselves for family and for country, and by some miracle of fate ended up living to tell the tale to sons and grandsons, even if it ended up lost to us today. Though these stories are undoubtedly few and far between, they are out there.

But maybe you have something still greater in mind: true perfection. A Garden-of-Eden-style love that defies even the little flaws and mistakes that make us human. I get that, and I think about it and hope for it perhaps more often than is healthy.

But even these longings that we have—for perfection of all kinds, but especially for a perfect love story—exist for a reason: they give us a target to shoot at. Yes I know, the whole “perfect love or no love at all” mindset is clearly not available in the real world. Try as you might to find it, you just won’t—and trust me, I’ve tried. But that doesn’t mean this will never be the case.

I mean, many of our oldest, most beautiful, reality-defying love stories were written by people who lived in a world that, if anything, was much less perfect than the one we live in now. A world where going hungry, working your fingers to the bone, and just fighting to survive were commonplace. Is it any surprise at all that these people longed for perfection—for a place and a future where everything was beautiful and lovely and serene all the time? Of course not.

So if I were to ask one thing of you, it would be this: Don’t dismiss this piece as a fanciful, immature demonstration of my own naivety that I’ll come to rethink as I get older and wiser. For this is how we make progress towards a better end: by dreaming, and imagining, and longing for things which are so obviously and so outrageously far out of our reach. If we didn’t, then things would always just stay the same.

So don’t expect perfection. Don’t expect a love that perfectly concords with what you’ll find in the final pages of a Jane Austen novel, or at the end of a dream about a king and queen reuniting after a decade.

But hope for it.

Look towards it.

Work for it.

Whether in this life or in the next, you might just find it.