Hear Me Out: The Edit

the idea of you

My next persona is who I’d be calling The Almost Lover. And well spoiler alert, I resonated with this persona a little bit more than I expected.

I enjoyed sitting down with this person because I realised that I wanted to see love through a man’s perspective. Do they really yearn like we do? Do they daydream and fantasize about things? Do they get lost in the picture the way we do? I wanted to know how this reality vs fantasy love feels like from the other end of the spectrum.

I needed to know.

And no, I didn’t want to rely on Nicholas Sparks or Drake as my male archetypes – I wanted something a lot closer to home.

Similar to the first persona, I started off by asking my friend what he thought love would feel like before he experienced it, and his answer simply being “Corny” was almost expected. I thought to myself, yeah this is a man’s perspective alright.

But as I was reviewing his takes and coming up with this post, a quick realisation hit me: in my first puppy love relationship, at first I constantly felt like everything we were doing was corny too. I loved the tropes and cliches in movies, but every time I pictured myself doing anything remotely romantic, a big red sign saying THIS IS CORNY flashed in my face.

I’m just going to blame that on growing up with only brothers. Lol.

My idea of a perfect movie being The Notebook and theirs being Inglorious Basterds, I have to admit that sometimes as a young girl, I thought it’d be cooler to be…cool. And sometimes, I wonder if that’s the same mentality people developed. Because honestly, I am starting to think that maybe it’s not that much of a gender thing.

We’ve somehow learnt to dismiss romance as ‘corny’ because staying detached feels safer than being perceived as ‘too much’ or ‘Miss/Mr. desperate for a fairy tale’

But defense mechanisms aside, reality eventually forces a shift. Because when I steered the conversation toward what love actually feels like to him now, his armor completely dropped.

He said “Euphoric.” And followed it up with “No better way to describe it to be honest.”

 I had to pause because I thought that word being used to describe love now was honestly beautiful. I was thinking to myself…What could have happened between then and now for such a change of words? Or rather…who? Because in my case, falling in love properly for the first time made me almost excited to openly do and feel the things I once forced myself to see as corny.

Before any of my little Peyis could even fully dissect that, he went on to say something that further helped with my exploration of The Idea of You statistically, “Most times it’s the idea to be fair, especially if you’re an overthinker, but I’d say 70% that person and 30% the idea.”

Ah, us overthinkers. Here we go again.

It’s almost inevitable to develop these thoughts that form into an idea of someone. And we’re overthinkers right, so It’s so unintentional. I think his percentage distribution made me realise though, that truthfully, it’s not like people just start thinking about this idea and completely lose sight of the person in front of them. You still kind of see the person, but now it’s like, you’re also seeing a future with this person.

And the future is so…its just this blank wide space in our minds that we kind of have fill up with thoughts. So of course, when we start liking someone seriously, our idea starts coming to the forefront of our minds a little more.

The reason why I’ve labelled this persona as The Almost Lover, is because I saw something in him and his experiences that I could see in myself. Those people, those relationships…never fully became what we hoped and imagined would. For whatever reason.

Hearing a man admit that he, too, sometimes finds himself building a future in his head, gave me a bizarre sense of relief. Like, I almost felt validated. As a recovering situationship queen, I’ve spent years carrying the secret guilt that my past relationships stalled out because I simply wanted too much – that my overthinking was a weapon that killed things before they could even start.

An overthinker’s mind is a dangerous place for a connection that lacks a label. When a relationship is undefined, the blank wide space becomes your playground. You stop looking at what’s actually happening (because let’s face it, sometimes it hurts too much) and you start focusing on what could actually happen.

But this validation was a double-edged sword.

After sitting down with The Fulfilled Romantic and now The Almost Lover, the relief turned into a quiet creeping guilt. I started looking backward. Could my own imagination have been the anchor keeping me stuck? Did I build an expectation so high that the real relationship never stood a chance?

But as I sat by my laptop spiraling into my own past choices, he offered a plot twist. He wasn’t always the guy who calculated the realism of potentials. He confessed that a few years back, he had ‘very little to say and zero willingness to explore love.’

But growth happens. And with his growth, came the sharp realisation that really spoke to me.

“A lot of people haven’t experienced love for what it truly is, its either fueled by lust or the potential idea.” 

And there it is again: the potential idea. We find ourselves trapped by the persona of The Almost Lover simply because we are trying to force a fantasy to do the job of a real emotion.

The future is a blank wide space in our minds, and as overthinkers we can’t help but paint a whole masterpiece on it. We start seeing a future with them but not necessarily because we can see it happening, but mostly because we’d like it to happen.

But that’s the tragedy of The Almost Lover: you spend so much time decorating a house in the future, only to realise that the person you’re building it with is still standing outside, unsure if they even want to come in or not.

But maybe that’s the real lesson of The Almost Lover. We don’t need to feel guilty for having big expectations or looking into the future. Our mistake isn’t that we think too much; it’s that we try to measure and contain something that isn’t meant to be containable. True love shouldn’t be that 70/30 split. It’s not a checklist or constant conversations to test out realistic outcomes.

“I think the purest form of love is similar to a cup overflowing, the emotions just pour out uncontrollably, unrecognisable and in the purest forms. Can’t even be described with words.”

Love is just a cup, pouring out uncontrollably. And maybe we need to stop trying to build the perfect container for it and just allow ourselves to be a little bit messy.

So hear me out…are you holding on to an idea? Or are you ready to let the cup of love overflow?