Fooled Around and Fell in Love

I was a fool. But did I fall in love?

Yes, but not in the way you’d imagine people fall in love. Relationship. Proposal. Marriage. And whatever comes after.

I fell deeply in love with people…and I built fantasies about them.

Not the kind you’re imagining!

Mine started small. I’d imagine a conversation that started a spark. Stolen glances across the room. A crowded bar where the room kept getting louder and we kept leaning in closer until everyone disappeared.

Then they would write themselves deeper. The stolen glances became emotional intimacy, the kind that takes years to build in real life, but only days in my mind. I’d already known what it felt like to be truly seen by this person. To matter to someone who didn’t know yet that they mattered to me.

A potential connection, a kind gesture, a slight romantic tension. Any of it was enough. My mind would take it, run with it, and build an entire world of fictional fantasy. A world only I could see, a secret only I could keep.

People came into my life and left. The fantasies didn’t. And when one concluded, I’d simply find someone new to fall in love with.

Then one day I met someone while traveling. He was kinder than the guys I had met before. Respected me more than I respected myself. I felt safer. A feeling I forgot existed, while trying to find new people to fall in love with. But with him, I had to be present and face what was in front of me. He hadn’t come into my life and left immediately. So, I did the only thing I knew to do in love and kept building fantasies while he was around, my mind moving faster than my heart.

The safer I felt with him, the closer I felt to him.

Although I knew it was coming, my mind had dismissed it — the time for us to part ways, to continue our travels to separate countries. But the fantasy didn’t match the reality unfolding in front of me. My body felt utterly betrayed by my mind. I had just started to feel safe.

I was in a new country, broken-hearted over a man who didn’t even know that I had fallen so deeply in love with him. I felt a gush of heat through my body, cold shivers immediately after. My heart started to beat faster. My stomach sank with a horrible feeling. Muscles tensed. I couldn’t move out of bed for days. I called a friend not knowing what was going on with me, only to find out I had anxiety.

I couldn’t continue like this, letting my mind sabotage me.

I decided to stop.

I sat with that for a moment. The fantasies had been warm. Beautiful, even. But they had also been lying to me. And I wondered what they had done for me. Why my mind had built them so faithfully, for so long. If it was safety to experience love without consequences in a space controlled by my mind, then I didn’t need the fantasy to have that. I could build that safety somewhere real.

So I did what I do when something isn’t working. I looked for the pattern, found the variable, and decided to change it.

Unavailability. That was the one that kept showing up. It had different faces, yet the same purpose. Keeping reality at a distance so the fantasy could thrive.

I had found a safe way to fall in love. One that protected my heart. Where I could fall in love, just as long as I followed the rule: no more chasing unavailability. I didn’t see it as restrictive. I was building boundaries for love to actually land somewhere. If the fantasy needed unavailability to thrive, then I would remove unavailability. What was left would have to be real.

I was ready to fall in love.

Then one day, I met someone again…and we lived in the same country. He was so kind, intelligent, ambitious. Our eyes met and I fell in love again. But this time, I wanted to live in reality, not in fantasies. So, I stayed present and looked for the obvious pitfalls of unavailability.

I saw none. The ‘universe’ works in mysterious ways — I thought.

My heart was leading, but my mind wasn’t that far behind. Deep within, I had a small fear brewing quietly, that this love might not work out either. So my mind called for backup and the fantasies started writing themselves, small at first, and growing deeper, more emotionally intense, as I spent more time with him…in reality.

Then one day, I found out he was in a relationship. He hadn’t tried to hide it. It was just there, findable. The kind of thing you’d know if you’d looked.

I hadn’t looked.

I sat with that for a while. Not just with the loss of him, but with that specific fact that I hadn’t looked. I had stayed present, just like I’d promised myself. I had followed my rules for falling in love. I had done everything right except the one thing that would have told me the truth.

Maybe I didn’t want to know. Maybe the part of me that was already writing the fantasy needed just enough ambiguity to keep going. So it didn’t look. And I let it.

But it was too late. The fantasy had already been running for months. I was in love, again.

I had nothing left to do but brace for impact.

I knew what was coming. My body had been communicating with me through anxiety. Fairly so, I never allowed it to feel. This time I just let it arrive. I didn’t fight it or reason with it. I was prepared to feel the wrath of my body, making me suffer for what mind my mind had done to it, again.

My heart didn’t need to be told. It already knew. It just quietly went back to wherever it goes when it’s done trying.

I had followed my own rules. I had stayed present. I had looked for the pitfalls. Except the one that mattered.

I wondered why I kept falling into the unavailability trap, time and time again. Every time I recognized it, it got smarter, less obvious. But it remained consistent, just showing up in trickier ways. There has to be something leading me to this trap every time I fall in love.

I thought if the ‘universe’ is true, then this must be a pattern.

I looked deeper. Nothing. I kept trying.

Then one day in therapy (don’t worry, I am in therapy), I opened up about this. This was so hidden and sacred to me, that I didn’t bring it to my therapist in the two years I had been seeing her. We looked for it together. And with a little help, there it was. A conflict. Two parts looking for love — both right in their own worlds, but sitting miles apart from each other.

The first part wanted love, in an obvious way. Something safe. Secure. Sustainable. The way people fall in love. Relationship. Proposal. Marriage.

But there was a second part that wanted love as well, just not in the way the first part desired it. In a way that felt big, deep, and exciting. It needed fireworks, not sustainability. It wanted the kind of love that gets written about in books, passed down in art, and remembered in history. It wanted what Orpheus had for Eurydice— a love so consuming he walked into the underworld for it. A love that costs something. A love that means something…precisely because it cannot last. And this part didn’t believe that a love like that could exist in a relationship where love is meant to last.

Both wanted love. But they were chasing completely different things. And the second part, from what I could tell, had been winning all along. My mind hadn’t been sabotaging me. It had been serving that part faithfully, finding the unavailability to build the drama, creating the fantasies for me to escape to a place where I could write these big, dramatic tales of love. I hadn’t been falling in love carelessly. I had been writing the only love story I believed in.

A love so deep it felt like fireworks.

A love that doesn’t exist in the real world.

A love I spent my whole life searching for.

I was listening to the Elvin Bishop song ‘Fooled Around and Fell in Love’. I wondered what that’s like. To fall in love and just live in it. To just wake up next to someone and find that this love, somehow, is enough. Not needing it to feel like Orpheus walking into the underworld.

I have spent so long writing the most beautiful tales of love. I know exactly how it starts, what gets said, what doesn’t. I have never once lived in them. Listening to the song, I wondered how lucky are those that get to fall in love and just live in it. Not just in fantasies or fiction, but in reality.