Why Human Beings Spend So Much of Their Lives Searching for Each Other

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This morning, sitting in the parking lot before work, I started talking without really knowing where the thought was going.

Maybe that is where some of the better thoughts come from.

Not from sitting down and deciding that I am going to write something profound. Not from trying to teach anybody anything. Not from pretending I have life figured out.

Just sitting in a car before work, with fifteen minutes left before I have to walk into the building, saying whatever is moving through my mind.

And somehow I started thinking about women.

Not simply attraction.

Not sex.

Not even relationships exactly.

I started thinking about what it means to meet another human being and slowly discover that there is an entire world inside that person that existed long before you ever arrived.

That is what has always fascinated me.

When I meet a woman and begin talking to her, there is this feeling of discovering another civilization.

For my entire life, I have lived inside my own world.

My memories.

My childhood.

My family.

My victories.

My mistakes.

My fears.

My humor.

My beliefs.

The things I regret.

The things I am proud of.

The things I have never told anyone.

Then suddenly another person appears.

And she has all of that too.

She has places I have never been.

People I have never met.

Memories I was never part of.

Stories from before she knew my name.

She sees things differently because she did not arrive at this moment through the same road I traveled.

And when two people begin talking, something strange happens.

For a little while, you are allowed to leave your own world and visit somebody else's.

You start learning the landscape.

What makes her laugh.

What makes her angry.

What embarrasses her.

What she believes.

What she once wanted to become.

What happened to her when she was sixteen.

What her mother used to say.

What food reminds her of home.

What she thinks love means.

What scares her about getting older.

What she wishes somebody had understood about her years ago.

Little by little, a world that was completely invisible to you starts becoming visible.

Maybe that is part of why meeting someone new can feel so powerful.

It is discovery.

And I do not think there is anything shameful about admitting that I enjoy that discovery.

I like women.

I can say that without reducing women to bodies.

I like the mystery of another person.

I like learning somebody.

I like seeing the world through a perspective that is not mine.

Male friendships can have tremendous depth too, of course, but romantic connection carries another layer. There is vulnerability there. Attraction. Possibility. The strange awareness that this person may eventually become part of your life in a way almost nobody else will.

Maybe that is why the beginning feels so intense.

Everything is unexplored territory.

Every conversation reveals something.

Every story opens another door.

You are learning a new world while somebody else is learning yours.

Then comes the word that complicates everything.

Relationship.

Somewhere along the way discovery becomes responsibility.

Mystery becomes familiarity.

The exciting question of Who are you? slowly becomes the ordinary question of What are we doing today?

The unknown world eventually develops streets you recognize.

You know the neighborhoods.

You know the shortcuts.

You know which roads lead to arguments.

You know where the beautiful places are.

You know where the potholes are too.

And perhaps one of the great challenges of long-term love is learning how to keep exploring a world after it no longer feels new.

Because nobody remains mysterious forever.

Eventually you know how she reacts when she is angry.

She knows what you do when you are tired.

You recognize the tone in each other's voices.

You know which joke she is about to make.

Sometimes you can predict the argument before the argument even begins.

And somewhere inside all of that familiarity, people can begin wondering where the electricity went.

Maybe some men chase one relationship after another because they are addicted to the unexplored world.

Maybe some women do the same.

I cannot speak for everybody.

I can only examine the question.

Perhaps what they are searching for is not simply another body.

Maybe sometimes they are searching for another beginning.

Another mystery.

Another civilization.

Another chance to feel the wonder of discovering someone.

Of course, discovery alone cannot build a life.

At some point every unexplored world becomes familiar.

And if a person constantly needs another new world in order to feel alive, he may spend his entire life arriving without ever learning how to stay.

That brings me to another question that came into my mind this morning.

What should we preserve of ourselves while we are searching?

I have complicated feelings about intimacy.

I look at sex differently than modern culture often seems to.

To me, there is something meaningful about the idea of preserving your body for the person you eventually intend to spend your life with.

I am not saying that as a saint.

I certainly cannot stand on a mountain and pretend my own history is spotless.

I have been married.

Divorced.

I have children.

I have loved people before.

I have made decisions with the limited understanding I had at the time.

I cannot demand from somebody else a perfect past when I do not possess one myself.

That would be dishonest.

But I can still look backward and wonder.

If I could return to the beginning of my life carrying everything I know today, would I make the same choices?

I don't think I would.

If I somehow knew that one day I would meet the person I was supposed to build my life with, I think I would want to preserve more of myself for her.

Not because sexuality is dirty.

Almost the opposite.

Because intimacy can be meaningful precisely because it is not casual.

There are things whose value comes partly from the fact that we do not give them to everybody.

Time.

Trust.

Secrets.

Commitment.

Our bodies.

Maybe there is something beautiful about being able to tell someone:

I waited.

I protected something because I believed someday there would be someone worth giving it to.

But even that thought becomes complicated almost immediately.

Who is the right person?

How could I possibly have known?

A person cannot see twenty years into the future.

Young Romeo did not possess the experience of older Romeo.

Neither does any young man or woman.

We make decisions while standing inside the age we are currently living.

Then years later we judge those decisions using wisdom we had not yet earned.

That is one of life's unfair advantages over our younger selves.

And then there is the dangerous word I used this morning.

Perfect.

If I could go backward, I said, maybe I would preserve myself for the perfect woman.

But there is no perfect woman.

There is no perfect man either.

Suppose I found a woman who had done everything exactly according to the standard I imagined.

She had never been intimate with anyone.

She had preserved herself completely.

Fine.

What else?

Is she kind?

Does she respect people?

Does she tell the truth?

Can she admit when she is wrong?

Can she forgive?

How does she treat children?

How does she handle money?

How does she respond when life does not give her what she wants?

What happens when she gets angry?

Does she humiliate the person she loves?

Does she manipulate?

Does she listen?

Can we disagree without destroying each other?

Does she share my faith?

Does she understand loyalty the way I understand it?

Can she stand beside me when life becomes ordinary?

Can I do those things for her?

Suddenly the question becomes much larger than sexual history.

A person's past matters.

But so does character.

Direction matters.

Growth matters.

The person standing in front of me today matters.

And my own history must remain part of the equation.

If I believe intimacy should be treated as sacred, then that standard cannot only point toward women.

It has to point back toward me too.

Being a man does not automatically excuse every decision simply because male desire is strong.

Desire is real.

Biology is real.

But restraint is also part of being human.

If I believe something is valuable enough to preserve, then I cannot make preservation somebody else's responsibility while granting myself unlimited exceptions.

Otherwise I am not describing morality.

I am describing convenience.

And perhaps this is where maturity becomes uncomfortable.

We begin life looking for somebody who meets our expectations.

Eventually we are forced to ask whether we meet our own.

That question is harder.

Maybe finding the right person was never supposed to mean locating a flawless human being.

Maybe it means meeting somebody whose values, imperfections, history, direction, and willingness to grow can somehow coexist with ours.

Someone whose world we still want to explore after we have already seen most of the map.

Someone we can remain curious about.

Someone who remains curious about us.

Because people do keep changing.

The woman you met five years ago is not exactly the same woman standing in front of you today.

Neither are you.

Perhaps long-term love survives when two people continue introducing themselves to each other.

Not literally.

But through change.

Through conversations.

Through admitting things they never admitted before.

Through new dreams.

Through growth.

Through failure.

Through becoming different versions of themselves and allowing the other person to discover those versions.

Maybe the opposite of boredom is not novelty.

Maybe it is curiosity.

And perhaps that is the real danger when curiosity disappears.

Not when the fireworks fade.

Fireworks always fade.

But when we stop asking questions.

When we assume we already know everything about the person beside us.

When the other person's world becomes reduced to a handful of predictable behaviors.

She always does this.

He always says that.

Here we go again.

Eventually we stop exploring and start categorizing.

A living human being becomes a familiar file folder.

Maybe that is when somebody begins looking across the horizon again and wondering what other worlds exist.

That doesn't necessarily justify leaving.

It certainly doesn't justify betrayal.

But perhaps understanding the hunger matters.

Because if we understand what we are actually hungry for, we might discover ways of feeding it without destroying what we already built.

Maybe we need novelty.

Maybe conversation.

Maybe independence.

Maybe adventure.

Maybe emotional intimacy.

Maybe we simply need to remember that the person across from us is still a universe.

There are still rooms we have never entered.

There are still memories we have never heard.

There are still thoughts that have never been spoken.

And even if we somehow learned every one of them, tomorrow that person will wake up and experience another day that changes the world slightly.

The map is never completely finished.

I don't know what all of this means for my own life.

And perhaps that is okay.

A journal does not always need to end with an answer.

Sometimes the purpose of writing is simply to preserve the question accurately.

This morning, before walking into work, I found myself wondering why human beings spend so much of their lives searching for each other.

Why does another person fascinate us?

Why do we fall in love?

Why do some people keep searching even after they have already found somebody?

What should we preserve while searching?

What parts of our past should matter?

What does commitment really require after mystery becomes familiarity?

And how much of love is actually the decision to remain curious about a world we already believe we know?

I don't have a perfect answer.

Maybe nobody does.

But I know this:

Every person we meet carries an entire world inside them.

Some worlds we visit briefly.

Some we never understand.

Some hurt us.

Some change us.

Some become home.

And perhaps growing older is partly learning that the goal was never to discover the perfect world.

It was to become wise enough to recognize which imperfect world is worth exploring for the rest of our lives.

And maybe, while searching for that world, to become somebody worth discovering too.

— Romeo

The RomNote Project. Words. Stories. Legacy.