The Fairy Tale of Right Person, Wrong Time

Once upon a time, there was the right man who arrived at the wrong time. The relationship would have worked out had the timing been better. As it was, life sabotaged what would otherwise have been a beautiful, magical, healthy relationship.

It’s a beautiful story. It makes for a nice bedtime tale to soothe us into sleep. It just doesn’t hold up when faced with the truth.

But for a long time, I held onto the idea of it. I was always good at telling myself a pretty story. It was a balm for a soul easily bruised by life’s cruelties.

A Simple Story, and a Hopeful One

I knew this story by heart:

There was a man, a good man, and I loved him. He loved me, and I know this because he told me that he did. When he no longer said those words, it was because a curse had fallen, making them impossible to speak aloud. But still, sometimes in quiet moments, I felt the truth of them, and I could do without those words for a little longer on the promise that the curse would soon be broken and the words would return to me once more.

The right man, the wrong time, an age-old curse, and true love’s kiss.

Isn’t that how the story is told?

A simple story could relieve the pain and give me hope when life felt hard and overwhelming. I could entertain a fantasy, and that fantasy would keep me going. But the truth is that the fantasy also kept me stuck inside unhealthy situations I’d have been better off leaving. I could numb myself just enough to survive, and somewhere along the line, I forgot that I could just walk out the door and start anew. As long as I was telling myself a story, I wasn’t dealing with the reality in front of me.

For a little while, The Right Man at the Wrong Time was a story I told myself on repeat. It’s a pretty idea, but while it can be a beautiful coping skill when we aren’t ready for the truth, it falls apart over time, flaking away to reveal the ugly reality behind the painted exterior. The right person is never there at the wrong time. That’s just the thing we tell ourselves to avoid feeling the full weight of rejection.

While I cannot say I’ve ever met the right man, I can say that I’ve heard of enough stories in my lifetime to finally understand this one truth: The right person comes along, and the timing is always right. Which is not to say the timing is ideal. Life can still be hard. It might even be messy. But the timing isn’t an excuse used when the right person comes along. It’s only ever used by the wrong person to explain away their wrongness.

The Story Relieves Pain, Delays Healing

But this is the story I needed to tell myself:

There was a man, a good man, and I loved him. He told me that he loved me, and I believed him. But one day, he stopped telling me that he loved me, and I could not find it in me to believe that he didn’t. It was easier to tell myself a pretty lie than to face a painful truth: that he thought he loved me, maybe wanted to love me, but loved me no longer.

If there was a curse, we call it “emotional unavailability,” and it arrived, an unwelcome visitor in what once seemed a stable relationship. And because I was not ready to let go, nor was I ready to acknowledge this uninvited guest, I stubbornly clung to the idea that refusing to say he loved me did not mean that he didn’t.

The wrong man, an age-old problem, and true love’s miss. The End.

The first story is certainly happier, but it doesn’t offer hope for healing. It only keeps us stuck in a cycle of believing what we want to believe while refusing to accept what we already know is true. The second story is much sadder, but it does allow room for healing. Gloria Steinem once said, The truth will set you free, but first, it will piss you off.

I couldn’t move forward with a fantasy that still depended on waiting for him to change his mind or make a different choice. In the real story, in my truth, I could see what was happening, and it left space for my heart to break so it could heal. The holding pattern of denial only ever delays the inevitable. It never, ever changes it.

A Better, Kinder, More Self-Loving Story

For a little while, I told myself a lie, and it made me feel better.

For a little while, I told myself the truth, and it broke my heart.

For a little while after that, I took that truth and used it to reinforce lies. I let myself believe in a not-good-enoughness that was deeply instilled in me since childhood. I carved that rejection deep into my heart and told myself that I must truly be better on paper. After all, I’d heard that many, many, many times before. I made his lack of love something about me.

But only for a little while.

These days, I tell myself a better story. A kinder story. A more self-loving story. And it is not a lie.

I tell myself that someone not loving me does not mean that I am innately unlovable. I tell myself that his rejection did not define me, nor does anyone else’s. I tell myself that it doesn’t matter if he loved me and just couldn’t say it or never loved me or still loved me or any variety of outcomes.

The right man is never there at the wrong time any more than the wrong man is there at the right time. Both are simply the wrong ones, and anything else we tell ourselves is a fairy story meant to soothe hurt feelings and chase away a reality we don’t yet know how to accept as truth. It may work for a little while to give us time to accept what we already know is real, but the fantasy never lasts. The truth waits in the dark to be revealed.

Sometimes, I tell myself that a right person might exist for me someday, somewhere out in the wide world. But I don’t sit down in a waiting room anymore and live off that hope. I don’t structure my life around what-ifs or what-may-bes. I live a life based on the reality as it is right now where I don’t need a soulmate because my soul is now and has always been whole.

Better Than Fairy Tales

But I can tell myself a pretty truth on the days when I need it.

Once upon a time, I loved a man, a good man, and while it did not last, my love was real. I felt it in a way that transcended anything I’d felt before, and when the relationship was over, the love did not bow gracefully out, disappearing in the dark but instead shone bright, a stark light aimed skillfully at my grief. My pain was as real as my love, and I wrote hundreds of thousands of words, and it failed to burn the love out of me, and one day, I stopped feeling ashamed of that fact and decided instead to embrace it. I loved, and I spilled more ink than tears because I was afraid if I ever started crying, I might never stop.

And one day, I knew that I had survived loving and losing, and if I was stronger, it had everything to do with me and nothing to do with him, and I could be brave enough to face the truth of that love without flinching away from it.

See? The truth is prettier than any fairy tale because it’s real. It’s mine. I loved, and nothing anyone else says or does could make that less true. I lost, and that’s a fact as true as any other. But I’m still here with a heart that doesn’t discard people casually, one that stays open to love even knowing how it might end.

The right man at the wrong time? It’s a childish story, a spoonful of sugar served up to make the medicine go down. But it’s not the sugar that saves us. It’s the medicine.

German American artist Steffen Thomas once said, “The world is too small for less than brotherhood, too dangerous for less than truth.” Because, in the end, truth matters far more than any lie we tell ourselves to cover up our pain. It’s the key to a cage we’ll stay locked in otherwise, put their by our own stubborn refusal to face what needs facing. I lived that way for a long time. I don’t live that way anymore.

Maybe the story is prettier when it ends with this right man showing up on his white horse, declaring his love and all that he learned on his long journey back to her. It’s a cute story, but it doesn’t bear up under inspection because how could he leave and what will stop him from doing it once again when time takes its toll? And why should she wait there for him to realize the error of his ways when a bold, beautiful life of adventure awaits? Perhaps even an adventure where a brave man dares to love her and never takes it back.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.