Love is a myth.

                 I know what you’re thinking: “Duh! It took you forty years to finally figure that out?”

                 Well, yes and no. You see, up until about ten years ago, I freely allowed myself to revel in the blind optimism that my perfect knight was out there…somewhere. Both of us were just waiting for Destiny to get off her fickle ass and weave a serendipitous, blissful moment where we would come across each other by happenstance:

A lock of the eyes across the restaurant where we each sit by ourselves, scarfing down chicken pad Thai and not giving a damn about looking like well-dressed pigs with our pierced snouts drowning in our troughs.

A bump of the elbows as we navigate past each other in the crowded, noisy disco that suddenly becomes silent and solitary when we glance at each other’s faces, our lips frozen mid-apology.

A brush of the fingers as we both reach for the same issue of Justice League on the shelf at the comic shop, whose cover prominently features our favorite mistress of magic, Zatanna.

                 But just like that fishnet-loving, backwards-speaking heroine, Destiny is a character of legend. A trumped-up whore pimped out to the lonely and the innocent, the naïve masses fooled by false promises from Julia Roberts movies and Nicholas Sparks novels that love is not only attainable in the real world but it is solid and it is true, and it will be with us ’til death do us part and eternally ever after.

                 In my impatient efforts to prod Destiny into creating that perfect happenstance, I managed to fool myself into taking people at face value—which means on more than one desperate occasion I believed the guy when he said the three words that have the power to raise the hairs on the back of your neck, the python in your pants, and the proverbial Titanic itself (complete with Leonardo and Kate frozen in a sickeningly-sweet embrace). Hell, I’ve even been overly quick to utter them myself. But when I said it, I meant it. At least, I meant it in the way I thought it should mean. My only source of reference up until that point was when Richard shouted the words to Julia in Pretty Woman. I more than half-expected my guy to respond with a pseudo-philosophical response along the same heart-melting lines as, “She rescues him right back.”

                 And therein lies the problem. If love were real, it wouldn’t be philosophical. Our old pals Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—they never let something as ridiculous as love get in the way of exploring their appreciation for their inner selves. The greatest love of all is truly inside every single one of us, and if more of us realized that fact there’d be a lot less people drowning in the misery of fruitless fantasy and impossible expectations.

                 But that would require effort. It requires taking the time to get to know ourselves. To love ourselves. That’s too much work. We’d rather someone else do the loving for us so that we can pull the bearskin rug out from under our inner selves while we upload the happiness virus into our brains. We allow the virus to fester and spread until it turns our gray matter to mush, where the sole method of eradication is to ingest cocktails of calcified serenity that only serve to reboot our optimistic charade.

                 Love truly is the drug. Heaven help us when withdrawal kicks in.

                 Now, I’m not claiming to have never been an addict myself. What many of us think of as love is certainly a great feeling: that sense of walking on air, that crystal clear awareness of everything around you and within you, that uncanny way life has of smelling like puppy’s breath. If only this manufactured and misguided notion were half as reliable as a canine’s unconditional devotion.

                 After many years of far more hits than misses, I’ve reached the point of acceptance: some dreams are simply not meant to come true. Not total acceptance, mind you. There will always be an aggravating sliver of my soul that will forever search for that perfect knight, hoping that my bitter cynicism is merely a sign of middle age fear. But no matter where it drags me, it’s a foregone certainty the longing will never be satisfied.

My soul has led me to many places since I found the courage to accept who I really am. Dark places, dangerous places…places where I in my sheltered Baptist youth never dreamed I’d be taken. In those dark places, the night vision of my soul was always in focus, searching the blurry shadows for any sign that, finally, my knight had come. In bars, in school, online, in every sincere face that caught my fancy, I’d seek out that one man who would make my life complete.

And now that my life is complete—through no one’s hard work but my own—I still find myself searching.

                   Maybe it’s not me. Perhaps it’s the guys I encounter who haven’t yet reached the level of self-awareness and self-satisfaction that’s necessary to achieve before you can share your inner demons with another person. If that’s the case, then I’m definitely screwed. 

I don’t expect perfection. I don’t expect to be worshipped. All I want is someone I can trust to be there when I need him and when he needs me. Someone who’s not afraid to laugh in his own face and realize that nothing—absolutely nothing—is forever. Someone who realizes that love is just a poisonous concoction brewed by insane poets and bottled in mass quantities by the selfish and skittish, the un-innocent waifs who still think Christ is coming back and that there actually is an unknowable purpose to human existence. What we call life is merely an adventure. But without a loyal companion at our side, we have no one with whom to share the experience.