You Should Fall In Love With The Wrong Person

Fall in love with your best friend. Promise each other that nothing will get in the way of what you have and know you’re both lying. Decide it’s worth it anyway. Learn how comforting and easy love can be – both track pants on the couch at 3pm and passionate sex all through the night. Relax into the inexplicably perfect relationship with the person who’s been there all along and wonder how you never thought of this before. Rejoice until the passion starts to wane. Until the tension starts to build. Until you realize that you fell in love out of convenience rather than genuine emotion and that now there is no turning back. Learn the difference between friendship and love and which lines you simply cannot blur in the future.

Fall in love with someone just like you. Admire their patience, their passion, their chaos and their depth. Love the way that their mind reels in time with yours and the way their laughter lilts around the rhythm of your voice. Worry that your fires may spark too brightly and that together you will burn down everything in your wake. Love them anyway. Burn with them anyway. Open yourself to the absolute madness of falling in lust with somebody who already knows the whole of you and get yourself in too deep, too fast. Let the intensity chew you up and spit you back out. Grow disenchanted with all the worst parts of yourself that you see reflected inside of them. Realize that you have some growing to do and that you may have to do it alone. Realize that in the future, one of you will always be enough.

Fall in love with an expiration date. Lose your mind and your heart and your footing to someone who can’t stay and decide it doesn’t matter. That your heart can handle the inevitable downfall in favor of the glorious upswing and give in to the temporary explosion. Let it be all brutal endings mixed in with beautiful beginnings and let the bittersweet overtones swallow you whole. Let the inevitable ending heighten and intensify each moment. Realize that you’ve fallen too fast and too carelessly and let it destroy you when it’s done. Learn to moderate and mediate your heart, but never to halt it altogether. You don’t need to live with regrets, so choose not to. Realize that sometimes love is allowed to be an end in itself, even if it was never meant to last. Realize that some of the best things simply can’t last forever.

Fall in love with someone who’s your opposite. Appreciate the contrast they bring to your complexity and learn to rely on them in ways you never thought were possible. Grow with this person – into a bigger, more comprehensive version of yourself that you didn’t know could ever exist. Appreciate the ways in which they challenge and change you, until the changes start to rule over the familiar. Realize there are some ways in which you are always going to only be yourself and that you need someone who can appreciate that, too. Learn to balance the new and old within yourself moving forward. Learn that there’s always room for improvement but it should never completely overtake what is already there.

Fall in love with someone taboo. Let your relationship be locked doors and white lies. Let your situation excite you, inspire you, entice you and inhibit you all in equal measure. Love your secret more than the person you’re keeping it with. Let the idea of what you’re doing become bigger than the actual act of it. Continue on the rush until your situation changes. Wait for it to become commonplace, known, accepted and average. Realize that you may have been more in love with the idea of what you had with someone than whatever was actually between you. Let the taboo fade and reality take over. Let yourself realize how easy it is to fall in love with a notion and forget about the person that supports it. Remember to be more clear-headed in the future, especially when it comes to other peoples hearts.

Fall in love with the wrong person. Fall in love with the loud one, the quiet one, the rash one or the responsible one. Fall in love with anyone who pushes you to change, challenge, grow and re-create yourself into a person you never knew you could become. Stop worrying so much about the fallout and start worrying about what you lose by never playing the game. Because maybe some of the most important relationships in our lives just aren’t meant to last forever. Maybe they don’t have to. Maybe they just get to be enough, in and of themselves.

And maybe every person who’s wrong for us in retrospect was nonetheless exactly what we needed at the time.