If You Love Someone, Never Touch Them

I’ve said this before but I think the people I have truly loved are the ones I’ve never touched. They are the people that have never hurt me, the people who have never disappointed me, the people who have never gotten close enough.

If you love someone, I recommend never touching them. That’s how to guarantee they’ll love you forever. See, if you touch them you become real and no one likes what’s real. If you never do, they’ll think of you as a fleeting fantasy, a magical mystery, and they’ll truly love you. You think, because you love them, that you want to be with them but you don’t. If you’re with them, they might see you cry, they might see you without make up on, they might see you as you truly are — alone, in your house. Once they see that, they won’t be interested in you anymore and they certainly won’t love you.

The best possible scenario for you to be in with someone you love, I think, is to be their friend. A friend is someone full of potential. They will never see you every morning, hungover, eating cereal over the sink. They will imagine you don’t do things like that. Not like their partner. Their boring, same-old, familiar partner. You will be better. You will have the power of ethereal distance. You will be their port in the storm and they will sigh with relief when they see you.

You will be there when they need to get away from their partner or when they need to just relax and forget everything. You! As the person they’ve never touched, who has never touched them. You get to be there and to hear their complaints and to seem “really chill.”

If you touch them, you get placed in another category. You become a risk, don’t you see? You become fragile like a time bomb. You lose your shiny newness. You lose your wonder. You become someone they talk to their confidantes about, rather than being the one who they feel close enough to to confide in. It all makes sense, right? Once you touch them, it’s all over.

Here is what happens then: You are happy for a little while. Then, you fight or they don’t like something you do or they go to the bathroom after you and smell your poop, whatever. Next thing you know, they’re at the bar with someone else telling them that you just “really stress [them] out sometimes” or that they just needed “like, one night away you know?” And you’re at home, wishing they’d open up to you, heart broken. Suddenly, you get it. It all makes sense. You should never have touched them. You should have just stayed their flirtatious, innocuous, understanding friend. You would have had them then. More than you do now even though they sleep beside you.

As their friend, you will be around a lot longer than the people they have touched. You will evoke no negative, complicated feelings in them. They will never need to “get away” from you. You will never frustrate them or stress them out. You will never make them cry. More importantly, you will never cry. You will be cool, casual, calm. They will wonder how you’re so great. They will tell you you are not like the others and you will wear it like a Girl Scout badge. You will never feel pain and you will never feel anything. Be untouchable and therefore impenetrable. You are a rock. You are an island. They will side-hug you and tell you they love you, and you will never stand on the street outside their apartment calling and calling because you just need to touch them again.

That’s my shitty advice — if you love someone and you really want it to be perfect forever, you should never even touch them. Take it or leave it — free from a shitty person.