When You Know, You Know. Right?

Does true love really wait?

Illustration: Harvey Doniego

I don’t believe in soulmates. I’ve never been able to subscribe to the idea of “true” love, the fantasy of star-crossed lovers, tied together by destiny, always meant to be. I just can’t accept any idea of love that invokes the notion of “fate,” or anything along the lines of it. Even more than that, I fear the weight of these sentiments and the dirty window they tempt us to strain our fragile necks and gaze upon love through.

The desire to surrender the agency of our personal choices to universal fate is evidence of the suffocating weight of our autonomy, the relentless pressure in navigating a sea of possibilities to carve just one precarious path. It’s a comfort, a heavy load off your back, to hand over the outcomes to a distant destiny – to imagine every decision you make being part of some transcendent narrative, a greater meaning that rises above and beyond your wavering fallibility. It's relieving to anchor yourself and your choices to the promise that they can be so easily sorted into piles of good and bad, right and wrong. But they can’t, and love is no different.

This is an uncomfortable truth, and uncomfortable things don’t break the box office (usually). So, we find and pay for comfort in the form of preordained, complete and tidy love stories delivered in cliche rom-coms, books, and songs, where every decision contributes to a completed script, and the outcomes and consequences of life and love are wrapped up in 90 minutes, 400 pages, 5 minutes. The credits roll, the final page is turned; no matter what happened before, the end is definitive and (usually) satisfying. The totality of these stories, with rounded edges and careful slopes, is gentle and digestible to the sensitive stomach of the mind. Life is not.

By immersing ourselves in such narratives, we start to view the world and our lives not through the dizzying lens of infinite choice, but rather that of a semi-detached viewer. But this approach to relationships carries with it a barrier to genuine connection – it shields us from the responsibility to acknowledge and accept one another’s flaws, to forgive, to work at love. Instead, complex relationships are abandoned on shallow rocky shores – washed ashore by the siren song of that elusive “true” love, flawless and gleaming, waiting in the great elsewhere. When you spend your life shackled to the promise of that singular soulmate waiting somewhere out of sight, you will find yourself subtly scanning for signs that any person you are with is not that soulmate, searching and weary of any indication, any confirmation that it's time to move on, to keep looking for that perfect ending – that perfect person – over the horizon. The one the audiences root and cheer for, that leaves not a trace of doubt, meant to be, destined from page one, fated love at first sight. Doubt and perfection are incompatible, yet we blindly chase the latter and shamefully feed the former.

Doubt cannot be evaded. It is so deeply human, so necessary to our freedom and our being, to wonder what might be, what might have been. It’s so easy to let go of the lifeline of false certainty, to float away aimlessly into the choppy sea of maybe, and before you can recover you’re drowning. This tension between real and possible defines us. It shapes our victories and our mistakes, breathes heavily on our regrets, and strengthens our convictions.

“When you know, you know” 

It’s a tired platitude, and one we hear echoed across mediums (see Margaret by Lana Del Ray). When it comes to love, this axiom suggests that uncertainty is impurity – to not know is a sign that something is irredeemably wrong. But doubt is not a death sentence, it’s the opposite.

There is a trilogy of movies – Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013) – chronicling the relationship of two lovers, Jesse and Celine, from meeting to marriage and beyond. I’ll refrain from too many spoilers, and highly recommend everyone to watch. The third and final movie, however, offers a line I’ve held onto. Years into marriage, Jesse and Celine find themselves at crossroads – career and life decisions driving tensions and resentments to an explosive boiling point. Their storybook love, once shiny with promise, seems dull and dwindling. The strain of reality threatening to snuff out the flame of passion, Jesse delivers a desperate monologue to Celine, which culminates in his pleading:

“But if you want true love - this is it. This is real life. It's not perfect, but it's real.” 

Maybe that’s the answer – if there really is any kind of “true” love, it is imperfection that makes it real and true. The truth of it lies not in the powers of destiny or fate, but the reckless faith two people must place in each other. It’s scary to accept how much we have to trust and forgive one another; it’s even scarier how much we have to trust and forgive ourselves. When you imagine yourself as a character in a movie, your choices are tethered to a written story, something decided and complete. Life, however, is all but complete, and you are the writer, director, lead actor, everything. Coming to terms with this aching responsibility feels like traversing a thick jungle, guided by a map, and suddenly the map leads you right to the edge of a steep cliff, nowhere to go but forward– beyond the cliff is cloudy and dark. You can’t make out at all where your next step will take you, and you begin to wonder why your trusty map would take you here, where you feel so lost and unsure. Then you remember that it was you who made the flimsy map you’ve been following with such blind faith, and you’ve been making up directions as you walk and when you sleep, under dim candle light and ugly buried fears. You feel untethered and unbound; suddenly you don’t know North from South, up from down, right from wrong. The wind is loud and it's hard to tell where you are or where you need to be, frozen and sputtering, suspended in time and sickening indecision.

But you can’t wait here at the cliffside forever. Eventually you have to move forward, close your eyes, hold your breath, and leap into the terrifying unknown. And when you look beside you, are you alone? Or is the person standing there someone you want to face that unknown with? If the answer is yes, maybe that’s when you know. Grab their hand, squeeze tight, and walk off the edge – no matter what follows further down the rocky path, your futures are forever intertwined in that desperate plunge, now coauthors to the ongoing stories of one another's lives. This pact doesn’t need to last forever to make a permanent mark. It can be fleeting and bright, or it can linger and scar. Sometimes we damage ourselves by holding onto things far longer than we should, and sometimes we starve ourselves by letting go of things early because we know we can’t hold them forever. The reality of impermanence should weigh less than the empty promise of forever, but it doesn’t. Yet, there’s lessons in everything and everyone we touch, every place where two frantic footsteps overlap in the shaky mud as they try to steady themselves. That’s what humans do – we write and rewrite each other's stories, messy and imperfect, through smudged ink and broken lead, mistakes and forgiveness, hopeless hearts and complicated promises.

Unlike a finished script or book, the next page of your life is always blank, and the ending is ever open. This scares me more than anything. But beyond this inevitable fear, there’s freedom and promise. The promise to love and to lose, again and again. To shatter into a million pieces, then be put back together by someone warm. This weary promise, where individuality and connection burn in one hungry flame, is a discomfort worth cherishing. More than the sting of fear, more than the nausea of uncertainty, more than the sinking agony of regret. Love goes beyond any formula or parameters; it is infinite and undefined. And it is in searching for ourselves in love’s foggy mirror that we begin to see the outlines of life as it unfolds, reflected right back at us. Maybe we need each other to see ourselves. To me, that’s true love.