Why Do I Keep Thinking About Cheating on My Husband?
She paid for an hour with someone she had loved for twenty-two years. A meet and greet, a photo, maybe two minutes of actual conversation. She had sent in eight questions. The singer chose the boring ones.
When her turn came, she stepped close and said something personal. It flew right past. The next person was already waiting.
She had always known, rationally, that this person did not know she existed. Standing there, she felt it. The difference between knowing and feeling is the difference between reading about cold water and stepping into it.
We build whole relationships in one direction. We know their work, their voice, the year they struggled, the line that saved us when we needed saving. They do not carry us back.
The ache is not that they are unkind. The ache is that they are kind in exactly the way anyone is kind to twenty-five strangers in an hour. Friendly. Appropriate. Already moving on.
She sat afterward feeling emptied out. Two decades of waiting. Now she had the moment and it was not enough. It was never going to be enough. The thing she had been reaching for did not live in a hotel conference room.
But she noticed something. She could feel the lack only because she had built something real elsewhere. The one-sided love used to be the best she had. Disappointment only lands when we have tasted the alternative.
She almost did not go to the concert that night. But she went.
The first few songs made her angry. Then came the older ones. The ones she knew by heart. Not the photo. Not the minute of small talk. This. The voice, the lyrics, the way they still landed inside her chest after all these years. The singer would never know her. But the music still did.
She cried several times. She also laughed and sang and clapped with the rest of the crowd.
She does not need to do the meet and greet again. She had to step close enough to see it was not what she thought. Now she can let the rest go.
Sometimes we are not trying to get closer to that person. We are trying to get closer to the version of ourselves they helped us find. The artist does not owe us the fantasy. They gave us the work. We built the rest ourselves.
One-sided love is clean. It does not require us to be known. It lets us stay in the safe position of yearning without ever arriving. Maybe the pull toward someone unavailable is not about them at all. Maybe it is about what we are avoiding closer to home.
Sit with this:
What does the person we keep thinking about let us not think about?
If we got what we are imagining, what would we still be carrying?
Who in our actual life is trying to reach us while we are looking somewhere else?