My Boyfriend Is a Better Person Than I Am

The moment I confessed my love to my boyfriend was the moment when I told him I could not be seeing him again.

I had just thrown away the pile of crumpled tissues that was slowly forming a molehill on my bedside table. I said to myself in the mirror, “You, lady, are going to tell him the truth. You are going to be a responsible person once in your adult life.”

I splashed cold water on my face and rubbed off the clumps of mascara still stuck on my eyelashes from the day before. I wandered to the living-room sofa with a newfound sense of purpose: For once, I am going to open Instagram to socially interact with someone.

I told him that although I found him charming — and that I may even fancy him — I didn’t want to lead him on because I couldn’t be in a relationship with anyone right now.

He asked why. I said that I’m going through things that I needed to sort out myself; I didn’t want to burden him with my issues. He asked if there was anything he could do to help — I said no, it has been like this for two years.

He texted, “Have you eaten?” And I just realized that the reason why I have been whimpering from stomach pain was because I was so used to not having anything in my fridge — and is simultaneously unwilling to go out for food — to the point that I have unconsciously trained my sense of hunger away. I replied, “No, but it’s fine.”

He showed up half an hour later to my doorstep with dinner and desserts. Taken aback, I nearly cried on the spot. As he microwaved the food and stored the rest in the fridge, I wondered, Is he always going to be this nice?

It was too good to be true. Why would a person do so much for someone who had just told them to fuck off from their life? If someone told me to fuck off, I’d tell them to fuck off right back.

Bewildered by such foreign treatment, I told him that it upset me to see him doing so much for me. He brushed it off and said he wasn’t doing that much, despite balancing a full-time job and study load and still managing to allocate the time to deliver these to me. I didn’t want to be infantilized, I said, despite being so incompetent at taking care of myself that the first and only time I owned a pet, it died in three days. It was a cactus.

Eventually, I sat him down from washing my dishes and said, “Look, you’re a Type A person, you have your shit together. I don’t. That’s why I’m saying you shouldn’t be with me.”

“Why does it matter whether we have our shit together or not?” he replied. “We’re all at different stages in life and I’m not going to stop liking you just because.”

I sighed and returned to munching on my food. Wiping off barbecue sauce from my lips, I asked, “Why do you like me?”

“I don’t know, I just do.”

“You can’t not know the reason behind why you decided on something.”

He looked like he was about to say something else but held himself. Instead, he posed, “Have you ever wondered why there are stars in the sky?”

“They’re formed through nuclear fusion when clouds of gas and dust in space accumulate and collapse under their own gravity.”

“No, you’re giving me ‘how,’ dummy. I’m asking ‘why’ stars exist in the first place.”

“Why?”

“Well, just as there’s no reason for the existence of the universe, wouldn’t the same arbitrariness hold true for the stars?”

“Sure.”

“Exactly. The same thing goes for me. Every now and then, you ask me why I love you. I think and think and think… because you wouldn’t take arbitrariness for an answer. But there really is no why.”

“How so?”

“You think about someone for no reason, you miss that someone for no reason… Your heart flutters around that someone for no reason… Liking someone doesn’t necessarily come with a reason attached, you know? So it makes sense that I can’t explain why I like you. I do because I do, that’s just the way I’m wired.” He held my hand, “Did that answer your question?”

“Kind of, but I disagree that there’s no reason for liking someone. Otherwise, wouldn’t we be able to fall in love with anyone?”

“Well, the fact is, I’m not able to.”

“So there must be a reason.”

“If there is, I don’t know. How does it work for you?”

“I kind of have this tally in my head and I predict how the person will act within every circumstance that they’ll meet my personality defects — and I calculate how long the relationship will last.”

“So, how long do you think this one will last?”

I thought for a while, gazing at the empty bowl in front of me. “Well… I usually reevaluate every three months.”

He held my hand tightly and looked at me sincerely, “I promise you you’ll have to ‘reevaluate’ three hundred twenty more times, assuming we both have eighty years left in our lives.”

He left my apartment that night, officially my boyfriend.

“Boys are like guavas,” my mother once told me. “They are sweet when young, but bitter when ripened.” They will always try to court you with everything they’ve got, she says, but once there is no longer the incentive to impress you, they’ll stop putting in as much effort. Biological organisms are hardwired to conserve energy and avoid spending them on inefficient outcomes, after all.

But as time went on, he consistently kept on sending me food. And when I told him to stop, he’d ensure that every date would result in me bringing home takeaway for tomorrow.

He would always pick up on my sensory overload during parties and take me aside to calm me down. He took me to art exhibits and read the history book I gave him despite having no interest in these things. (The only stuff he reads are software documentations and tech reviews.) How he managed to do all of these without feeling resentful at the lack of equal reciprocity left me perplexed. I couldn’t imagine doing any of them myself.

So, I told him I had a quid pro quo policy and that because I was unable to reciprocate his kindness, he should stop being so selfless. “But you’ve given me so much too,” he’d say. However, there’s a difference between doing something because you logically decided it was the ethical thing to do versus doing something because… of a good conscience?

Good people just have a conscience that motivates them to do selfless, altruistic things — which I could never understand by heart.

“How are you like this?” I asked him. Which philosopher do you read? But he said, “I don’t know, I’m always like this. It’s a nice thing to do.” I didn’t grasp how people could feel what the other person needed and naturally feel compelled to make the other person happy.

“I don’t get why you think you’re not a good person,” he said. “You have a very strongly defined ethical system.”

That raises an interesting question: If you conduct ethical things from the premise that you logically infer that something is the “right” thing to do within each circumstance, and that not doing it would result in you being an unethical person, does that make you a ‘genuinely’ good person or merely calculative?

It’s true that I refuse to take more than I can give. And it’s also true that my boyfriend gives more than he’s willing to take. His superior theory of mind compensates for my substantially weaker one. But everyday, I remind myself that his aptitude for kindness is not a flaw in my character.

Interestingly, for reasons that still boggle my mind, he believes that these differences make us compatible. “I appreciate the way that you’re always reminding me to prioritize myself over other people,” he says, “because sometimes, I need that too.”

I make sure to remind him to not exhaust himself for other people, and he appreciates that I’m the one setting those boundaries.

Maybe being selfish is not antithetical to being selfless — but rather a precondition to it. I still believe that he is a better person than I am, but I also remind myself of his words: