What Else Is Out There?

Your boyfriend reads like an eighth-grade romantic checklist: he’s funny, thoughtful and charming. He’s smarter than you are, even though you’d never admit it to his face. He’s so saccharine that even the bitterest of your friends have started to use him as the standard to which they measure their own boyfriend’s behavior. He’s everything you want, but somehow you still find yourself insatiable. He’s looking at you, and for some reason you’re looking out the window.

Are you a jerk? Well, yes. But you’re only human.

When you first settle into a real relationship, it feels refreshing. You’re no longer trading a few hours of sleep to stare at your phone and see if he’s strayed from the aloof dating contact protocol. Your raucous and regrettable nights have been filed neatly away in photo albums. You’ve completely taken tissues off your grocery list.

But once you’ve successfully excavated the drama from your life and let the dust settle, you come face to face with the excruciating and staggering reality that things are finally good and you don’t know how to handle a life that doesn’t need to be fixed. You’re starting to wonder what else is out there.

The thing we seem to forget is that we know what’s out there: dudes who don’t kiss us back, bros who don’t respond well to “no,” men who just want to be your buddy, the illustrious forbidden guys, people who just aren’t that into you, and a long line of jerks. And of course, your ex is out there too, with his new girlfriend in tow.

And yet, a part of you wants to swap the relationship you have for the fantasy that there might be bigger and better things in store for you. If you just hang out at the coffee shop around the corner long enough, a foreign, independently wealthy intellectual will finally walk in, compliment you on your choice of reading material, and sweep you off your feet into the romance of the century. If you just come up with the wittiest OKCupid profile you can muster, you’ll surely attract some winners. It doesn’t even matter that you don’t know a single person who has ever returned from an OKCupid date without a degree of trauma — they’re not you, and you’re different. If you just move to a bigger city, you’re bound to bump into the soulmate the universe has been hiding from you all of these years — it’s population density science.

The thing is, there is always going to be the possibility that there are bigger and better things in store for you. But when you have something good, don’t sabotage it for an exhaustive list of what-if’s. You’re already living the endgame of all of your fantasies and it doesn’t matter what else is out there right now because you’ve been there and you managed to escape with the best thing it had to offer.

You’re a jerk and you’re human, but you don’t have to be an idiot: love the one you’re with.

Photo found on http://missflowers.tumblr.com/page/7