Date a man who loves you more. Meet him young, at a time when you’re not old enough to realize how precious he is. Fall in love carelessly. Start to think he must be the one, begin building a life with him. Become entangled with his family and him with yours, believe he will be the father of your children in later years. Date a man who loves you more because he will love everything you hate about yourself. The man who loves you more will rub your feet when you’re tired and take your cousins out for ice cream because he is simply that kind of man. He will abandon his plans to come rub your back when you’re sick without you ever having to ask. The man who loves you more will allow you to grow as a person without taking space. He will be patient, kind; he will know when to apologize and when to be quiet. He will never yell. He will laugh at your jokes and find you beautiful, even at your worst. The man who loves you more will love you entirely, unconditionally; he will follow you anywhere and do anything for you.
As you grow with the man who loves you more, ignore the creeping sense of boredom. Ignore it because it is selfish, it is unbecoming, and you know you should be satisfied with this perfect man. Ignore it because you watch the women around you, your friends, your sisters, your co-workers, and you know they all long for the man you have. Ignore the melancholia and the longing you feel every time you watch a couple fight with passion, with anger, with fire. Count on your fingers the number of fights you’ve had over the years, and consider yourself lucky without really believing it. Ignore the nostalgia you feel for moments that have never existed. Ignore it because you know passion is fleeting, passion is mercurial; passion is not something you build a life on. Passion will not raise your kids, it will not pay your mortgage. When passion fades, you tell yourself, you are left with nothing but regret. Ignore the slow leak of emptiness filling your gut when you kiss him, because it does not belong in your life. It does not belong with this perfect man who loves you more. He is dependable and with him, you know you will lead a lifetime of contentment. You will travel with him, you will push him towards his goals. You will have wonderful memories and photo albums. You will celebrate milestones with pride, you will grow old holding his hand and raise balanced children with him. When your children fall in love, you will smile and hope they find someone who loves them more, because it will guarantee them the satisfied life you have led.
Do not date the other man because the other man will never give you the stability you know you need. Stay away from the other man because with him, you are unreliable. The other man will never be there for you with the same dependability you have come to expect. He will challenge you and push you to question everything you think you know about yourself. The other man will love you, he will love you in ways that make you abandon every certainty you have ever had, but he will not help you keep your balance. Just when you think you have figured that man out, he will disorient you, you will be winded, you will not be able to breathe. Date the man who loves you more because the other man will never need you. He will miss you when you’re gone, he will secretly be broken, but he will go on without you because he does not depend on anyone. This man is treacherous, you cannot trust yourself with him.
When things are good with this man, you will be euphoric. You will be the best version of yourself. You will look in the mirror and find you are beautiful. You will be the luckiest woman in the world, and you will believe it. You will tell him you love him and the words will explode out of your heart because it will be the first time you have ever encountered such irrevocable truth. He will say it back and mean it, and you will feel like you can never be close enough to him. You will lose yourself in him, and he will lose himself in you. Stay away from this man because your happiness will be fleeting. When things are bad with him, he will fight back. He will not be patient, he will not soothe you. The other man will be infuriating. He will be selfish, careless with his words and at times even cruel. He will try to inflict as much pain on you as he himself is feeling. He will not apologize and he will push you to your limits. With this man, you can expect the dizzying agony of passion, the blurred oblivion of apathy, the delicious comfort of despair, the addictive misery of loneliness. You will tell yourself that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, but in that moment of utter hopelessness, you will not believe it with absolute conviction.
Date a man who loves you more because while he can never be quite enough, the other man will always be too much. The other man will leave you thirsty for more, parched for him, panicked like a drunk who has finished his last bottle. Date that man who loves you more, fall for him in a slow and steady way, build a foundation with him and consider, truly consider, how lucky you are to have found him. Do all this, because with the other man, you will never know anything but a frenzied hunger and all-encompassing madness. With that man you will burn bright and fast, and you will be invincible until you are not. Find the man who loves you more and keep him because the worth of happiness cannot be measured in days and months and years, and those fleeting few memories of pure, unadulterated bliss will never measure up to the lifetime of contentment you will have with the man who loves you more. Tell yourself this over and over, let it become your mantra, and condition yourself to believe it. Forget the other man, or at least try to, ignore the smells, the sounds and the things that remind you of him, ignore the way he made you feel, because you are better off apart. Together you make the world explode, but you cannot survive in it after. Date the man who loves you more, choose him and never let him go, because you are wise enough to know that stories of true love never have a happy ending, and with this man at least you will die knowing someone loved you more. 
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