If you are travelling to Thailand to escape the heat at home for cool, deserted islands empty of your compatriots — you are about to be disappointed.
And if you are staring with exhausted eyes at the changing screens on the apps, breathing a silent prayer that there you will run into "your other half" — a fiendish disappointment awaits you.
Both examples share a dark feature that condemns them to chronic heartache.
What is that common denominator? They both believe in a bad idea.
And a bad idea is characterised by only one thing — it is simply wrong.
Today, with your permission, I want to address such a bad idea, one very common in the romantic field. I'll try to do it in a factual and empathetic way, but I don't promise that a little heat won't escape here and there.
It is the belief that the process of searching for a partner is supposed to end, ideally, when we find our other half.
A volley of freezing water: it won't happen. There is no such thing.
And I want to explain now the two lies that make up this harmful lie, so that you stop believing in them, and so that things go better and more optimistically for you.
So here it is: behind the myth of "my other half" hide two slippery and poisonous lies — the lie of precision, and the lie of filling the gaps. Let's mow down these weeds one by one, in order.
A. The lie of precision
Lock and key. A perfect fit. Exact. Two souls merging into one soul. Paradise.
The psychological — and social, and biological — complexity of each of us is enormous. Unimaginable. The belief that the painful and Sisyphean process of building a reasonably harmonious relationship can end in a fraction of a second or on one date is touching, but not realistic. Infantile, even.
In fact, in the overwhelming majority of cases even we find it hard to formulate precisely what would be precise for us, and if we find it hard to put clearly into words what we want and need, does it seem logical to you that someone we met an hour or a week ago would work it out?
I understand why you pray for it — you are in pain and afraid. The thorny and imperfect collision between your hopes and reality creates suffering, and the routine disappointment of date after date creates the fear that perhaps it won't work out and, heaven forbid, we shall die alone.
Legitimate feelings, but the moment you raise your hands and stop trying — you may as well order a burial plot.
Never give up.
And on that optimistic note, let's move to the second lie.
B. The lie of filling the gaps
Loneliness, and especially loneliness after heartbreak, sharpens enormously your sense of what you lack, and of what is lacking in you.
We fantasise about a partner who will see us in our nakedness — not only the physical kind — and say to themselves, "All right, it's not so bad, I accept it with love, I can live with this."
And that is an amazing primal feeling of validation.
What a shame that the odds are it won't happen.
The partner arrives at our door preoccupied with their own deficiencies, and with their own private attempt to fill that void, through us.
Our deficits, the pains of the past, the holes in the self-image, our worries about the future, our anxieties, our small and irritating habits — all of them are here to stay, and all of them will be subject to a long and exhausting negotiation as a couple, at the end of which we may be able to take a calm, lungful breath and feel that we have established a good, clear-eyed partnership here.
To finish, and to drive the message home better, think of a stone in a field. Just a stone rolling about there.
Pick it up. Look at it.
It is full of bumps, hollows and protrusions, and it is a not always aesthetic combination of many shades and half-shades. Many crevices and holes have been carved into it by the teeth of time and the north winds.
Does it seem to you that there is another stone that would fit it exactly, that would suit it so well that a passer-by would mistake the two of them for one stone joined together?
If that stone one day wants to be part of a functioning structure, it will have to undergo a vigorous grinding-down of sharp edges, and even here and there a painful breaking-off of a few protruding points.
And then, perhaps…