My romantic track record is controlled by this law: the second I decide that a person is my soulmate from initial chemistry, he is guaranteed to disappear within a month. We love to glamorize connections as the ‘Red String Theory,’ which is the invisible string connecting two people whose paths will eventually cross. In reality, as a college student, I mistook shared hometowns and mutual friends for the underlying recipe for cosmic fate.
Case in point: my most recent summer romance was with a guy who grew up six minutes away from my childhood home, attended my college, and appeared in my life like a sappy rom-com lead. Within the first two weeks, we were swapping the archetypal “it feels like I’ve known you forever” lines. When he dangled loose promises to make things official, I totally bought into it.
Then arrived the ultimate moment of liquid courage based honesty: I blurted out the total truth and admitted,“I really, really, really like you!”
I guess I said too many “reallys” and scared him away. The absurdity? I wasn’t even fully conscious of my own words, yet he treated it as a signed marriage certificate. In 2000s rom-coms, this is usually the part where whimsical music rushes in. For him, it became a jump scare in a horror film. Without warning, his committed timeline turned into cold feet.
Days later outside Brown’s Cafe, he confessed he was operating on“autopilot,” worried I liked him more than he liked me, and admitted he couldn’t show me his “real” side. That was the moment I had to accept the uncomfortable truth: having a crush is rarely about the person sitting across from you. It’s about our own quiet need to be chosen, projected onto someone who hasn’t earned that role yet.
Experiencing high spiked moments of connection, we aren’t genuinely falling in love; we’re filling empty spaces with perfect projections and ignoring red flags over banter. Once the fantasy is gone, it’s hard not to take it personally, but it’s really just the missing scenes catching up to the plot. Moving on from a sudden 180 is easier said than done. I’m still a girl who wanted the story to be real, and there isn’t any shame in wanting happiness ever after. The mistake was just rushing to write it before opening the book. But that’s why slow-burn connections always win. The people who start off our radar don’t require us to assume any missing traits. They view us unfiltered and completely as ourselves from the beginning. Genuine attraction doesn’t get cold feet when you lay your heart on your sleeve. But rather, it admires the authenticity and stays.