I was born to love. I’m this soft and gentle introverted guy with a bottomless well of tenderness and affection. It is, without exaggeration, the greatest blessing I have ever received.
I vehemently ADORE the idea of making a special someone so happy and being so devoted to her happiness and well-being. I get so giddy just thinking about it! I’m this big bundle of joy and affection inside who wants to shower someone with hugs and kisses and words of admiration. And yet, I have a tender, steady energy to me that will dole out that affection at a calm and measured pace.
That’s one of the things I love the most about this personality. I have this sweet, quiet, and unassuming presence, but under the surface is an enormous wellspring of love and care brewing of inside of me that I just HAVE to let out. My inner geek would meticulously observe and study my partner’s wants and needs, her likes and dislikes, and the things that make her feel loved and cared for. And then, I would translate my theories into sweet, sweet praxis.
And when any kind of affection is shown back to me, I will completely MELT. There is no facade of masculine stoicism here. If my partner touches me, I’m going to turn into jelly. Everything she does will have me on the floor, incoherently blubbering about how much I love and appreciate her. I live for utter trust and surrender to someone who loves and cares about me, and my partner will surely know it.
I’d love a relationship where we treat each other as equals, where we listen to one another and make decisions together as a team. A relationship filled with mutual love and devotion where we can take turns lavishly melting each other with affection sounds like heaven.
I’m so endlessly glad that I didn’t end up as some misogynistic jerkwad who treats his partner like dirt and orders her around all day, because my father was exactly that. But I shouldn’t pat myself on the back too much, because I can always improve and I will always have blind spots. I need to be attentive to my partner’s needs, communicate effectively with her, and honestly reflect on what effects my actions had. Cultivating a loving relationship is an ongoing process, not a one-and-done deal. It takes work and commitment, and that is an endeavor that I wish to dedicate myself to.
I’ve never actually been in a relationship (I’m only 22), but I want to actively grow and nurture a healthy mindset now. I’m an idealist at heart, but I know that ideals are goals to work towards, not promises to expect. In order to for a big, beautiful flower to bloom, you have to start from a seed and care for it over time. You can’t just expect perfection to appear on the first day. The mindset I wish to cultivate is the knowledge and the heart required to become a gardener of love, to carefully attend to those delicate flower buds every step of the way so that they may blossom into big, beautiful roses.
But just knowing that I hold the power inside to create something so heavenly and fulfilling for someone else in spite of the world’s hardship and strife… it’s hard to describe to beautiful that is to me. And it’s an incredible honor to have the privilege of creating anything even approximating that. I feel a moral duty to take good care of this part of myself and use it to create the most loving and supportive relationship that I can.
Whenever I indulge in my fantasies of a loving, nurturing relationship, I feel waves of euphoric warmth wash over me. It feels so cozy and comforting, like being wrapped in a warm blanket or a gentle hug. It’s the ultimate life hack; I can trigger a whole deluge of positive emotions for free, without needing separately packaged, inferior versions to be sold to me piecemeal. It feels uniquely soul-mending, like something making me whole again, restoring a sense of safety and security that I seemed to have lost long ago.
It has made me so much happier throughout the day. I find myself wanting to be so openly warm and caring to other people. Negative things just don’t impact me as much. Seeing who I am in these fantasies makes me want to bring that part of my personality out more, to say kind things where I may not have said anything before.
My dream isn’t to become rich. It isn’t to become famous, to become an astronaut, or to climb Mount Everest. My dream is to become the sweetest, cuddliest, most sensitive lovebug of a boyfriend I can possibly be, and make someone else so incredibly happy.
And I am so, so happy that I have the chance to embody that person.
You sound like someone who will kill my dog if I talk to a co-worker at lunch.
So I’m guessing that all of the sentimentality at once comes across as super clingy?
That might be an aforementioned blind spot that I have to look out for. Consciously, I think controlling behavior like that is super gross, and the idea of being attached to someone who doesn’t reciprocate or isn’t comfortable with that level of affection feels super counterproductive; why invest in painful, unreciprocated relationships when I can just find someone else? If I have attachment issues, why not go to therapy and work through them, then try again with someone else?
I guess this post gives the impression that I would get WAY too into someone too quickly, and then find myself unwilling to leave because of a scarcity mindset. I was hoping that the metaphor of slowly nurturing a seedling until it grows until a flower would give the impression that I would develop the relationship in a careful, thoughtful manner, but eh, it is what it is.
But, assuming that’s your point, I appreciate you bringing it to my attention, because even if I’m not the crazy psycho overly-attached girlfriend/boyfriend meme, I think individual agency is something that I could be thinking about more, not just for relationships, but also for friendships.
Ultimately, I’m just trying to be a good person. And maybe dumping a bunch of feelings on the Internet at once makes me look crazy. Heck, maybe I AM a little crazy. But as long as I accept that I’m imperfect and that my understanding will never be complete, I can continually improve by observing what effects my behavior has on others and adjust accordingly.
So yeah, NOT dumping all of my feelings on someone at once is a good idea lol.
This whole post makes it seem as of you have mental health issues. I do not mean this as a joke or to be rude. I think you need to talk to someone about how you feel. These don’t seem healthy emotions. This post does not say, “I’m a mentally stable person who’s ready for a relationship.”
I just struggle to comprehend what those issues actually could be in concrete terms. I sort of exaggerated my speech on purpose just for fun, so that’s probably where a lot of the “crazy” impression comes from. And I’ve never actually been in a relationship, so there’s nothing to go off of there. Am I ACTUALLY overly attached and clingy? Or am I just bad at writing and my post just made a bad impression? We don’t know.
Like sure, I probably come across as weird and could do more to think about the actual nitty-gritty of a relationship rather than embellishing raw feelings, but other than that, I don’t know what the actual problem is other than “This guy sounds weird.”
Maybe because of the way I came across, people perceive everything I say to have a double-meaning, where caring for someone means wanting to control them and wanting to show kindness means wanting to lure people in. Maybe a lot of what I said isn’t bad in principle, but because I said them weirdly, I look like some kind of serial killer psychopath or creepy incel freak. I’m just too uncanny valley to be a “normal” person, so EVERYTHING I said loses its innocence and gets tainted with “What does he REALLY mean by that?”
Because if I were to tell someone what my feelings were, I’d say that I want to be a romantic partner for someone, to care and be cared for, to work together and make decisions as a team, and to continually improve myself so that I can best fulfill my duty as a partner. Sure, I may feel strongly about those feelings from time to time, but that’s ultimately what they are. Is that bad? Is that something I should go to therapy for? Or have I simply expressed these feelings in a way so unconventional and distorted that it comes across as creepy?
Either way, this has been a fascinating and unexpected exploration of “What happens when I miscommunicate or misrepresent myself in a horribly disastrous fashion?”
bruh. You’re obsessing over your non existent partner way too much. You don’t just sound weird or clingy. You sound like a psycho.
You need to go to a therapist and tell them literally everything you’re talking about here and they can help you sort out how your thinking is problematic.
I think I could definitely spend less time daydreaming and more time going outside for sure. In fact, that’s kind of the point of the daydreaming: to figure out what appeals to me romantically and how I wish to conduct myself as a friend and partner.
I’m not keen on having some kind of imaginary friend, and I’m definitely not keen on being in-your-face hyper-emotional towards others because I literally can’t do that. I am just way too introverted and it goes against every instinct in my body. This whole post is an extreme exaggeration because it’s made to be more abstract and artistic, made to capture the intensity of feeling; it isn’t meant to convey what the relationship is literally like. Clearly, this is not how most people read text, and I should probably have realized that sooner.
I imagine the actual relationship to be slow and easygoing where we actually leave each other alone for most of the day. We would only interact a few times a day in moments lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes. We might also spend time together in quiet ways, like reading books in the same room. What I have done in this post is blow up those very small time windows and made them seem like that’s what the whole relationship looks like. It’s not. I don’t think love will free me from having a social battery.