When Someone Finally Comes Along, You Forget What You Wanted

I often find myself puzzled by relationship problems. Despite life experience, reading, and research on the topic, it’s still difficult to see real solutions to the many questions that arise. In the end, I often come to the same conclusion: as a Buddhist, perhaps it’s best to face life’s great truth—that everything passes. Bad relationships, good ones, problems… and we ourselves as well. Of course, I have friends—fellow “researchers” of this topic—who say we don’t need to go that far. “There are solutions,” one of them told me. “You just have to pay attention.” “One of the biggest problems,” my friend said, “is that we practically starve ourselves emotionally. We long so deeply for someone to finally find us, to belong, to curl up next to someone at night—to be loved and to be happy. And while we wait for this great love, we actually have very clear ideas about what happiness would look like. We imagine what we want to experience with that person, how we would build a family, how we would work, what our life together would be like. We carry a very precise vision of our future in our minds.

And then, when we finally meet that great love, we’re so happy that we suddenly forget everything we wanted—and what truly makes us happy. We begin to live a life we never actually desired. A life whose individual parts don’t even appeal to us, let alone the whole. We adapt to a system that doesn’t suit us at all, convincing ourselves that it doesn’t matter—as long as someone loves us. And somehow, we assume that later, when the initial excitement fades, we’ll both want something different anyway—different rhythms, different lifestyles—and then we’ll change things. But it doesn’t happen that way. Yes, the passion fades—but the circumstances don’t shift in the way we hoped. We realize that the patterns we established in the beginning have become fixed, almost concrete. Every attempt to change them feels unsuccessful—almost doomed from the start. At that point, we want nothing more than to end the relationship and be alone again. To finally live according to our own rhythm, our own desires. To not have to adapt, to not have to compromise—just to be surrounded by people and things that genuinely bring us joy. And because we now know exactly what we want, we begin to create that ideal life. And it does come together—only… we are alone. Then, slowly, time passes. And once again, we begin to long for someone to love us, someone to hold at night. And when that person finally arrives… we forget, once again, the simplest thing: to remember what we truly want. — Agatha Seymour /This piece was written years ago. As I return, it finds its place here once again, unchanged./