Rita Ora might have sung, "I don't want somebody like you, I only want you, I only want you, ay." It's a beautifully complicated sentiment, filled with the drama of exclusivity and the agony of choice. But honestly, that whole "I don't want someone like you, I only want you" thing? It felt a little too dramatic, a little too nuanced, for my own life. My struggle was simpler, more elemental, and certainly less pop-anthem ready.
It was just: I only want you. Period.
There were no caveats about similar people, no grand philosophical battles over substitutes or second-best. There was just the singular, blinding desire for a specific, soul-level connection that seemed forever out of reach.
My name is Brian, and I was perpetually stuck in the liminal space between hopeful expectation and quiet, resigned heartbreak. It wasn't that I didn't have people. I was rich in friendship. I had a vibrant, gloriously chaotic crew—the kind of people who were always ready for a 2 a.m. diner run, who knew my worst habits and loved me for them, and who could pull off a spontaneous road trip with zero notice.
But romantic love? That was the ocean I couldn't cross, the white whale I couldn't beach.
Being gay, at least in the modern context, often felt like navigating a beautiful, sprawling forest with a faulty compass. The landscape was breathtaking—diverse, creative, and full of potential paths leading everywhere and nowhere. Yet the way to the clearing—the way to the one, the quiet sense of certainty—felt obscured, hidden behind layer upon layer of digital static and performative coolness.
I watched my straight friends fall in and out of love with what felt like effortless, frustrating frequency. They met people at coffee shops, in the bulk-food aisle at the grocery store, through mutual friends at dull office parties. They seemed to possess a built-in infrastructure for intimacy. The universe, it seemed, was constantly presenting them with soft, low-pressure options.
For me, it was always a hunt.
It began with the apps: the endless, profile-swiping, highly curated, micro-analyzing hunt that left me not just single, but utterly exhausted. Every first date was a high-stakes interview. I'd walk in and simultaneously try to be my most charming, witty, and available self while desperately trying to gauge if this person was even capable of returning the deep, steady, soul-level love I felt ready to give. It was a pressure cooker of expectation, and the pressure always seemed to be coming from inside my own desperate chest.
It wasn't about sex or hookups, to be clear; those were readily available, temporary easements on loneliness. It was about the slow, steady, rewarding burn of genuine partnership. The kind of relationship that accumulates knowledge over time, where you know their complicated coffee order without asking, their worst childhood fear, and the exact spot on their neck that makes them laugh when you kiss it. I wanted to build a home, not just visit a hotel room for a weekend. I yearned for the permanence of a shared, lived-in space.
The breaking point arrived on a Tuesday, fittingly. Not a dramatic Friday night, but a soul-crushing Tuesday afternoon, when the gray reality of my search felt heaviest. I was sitting on my sofa, staring at my phone. I'd been scrolling through the same app for twenty minutes, rejecting perfect-looking guys for reasons I couldn't even articulate in the privacy of my own mind.
Too muscular. (He'll spend too much time at the gym.)
Too much hiking. (He'll want to be outside when I want to be reading.)
He used the word "synergy" in his bio. (He's probably a nightmare.)
Then the truth hit me, sharp and cold: I wasn't rejecting them because they were inherently bad matches; I was rejecting them because I was tired of trying. I was tired of the emotional labor required to start from zero. I wanted to bypass the awkward small talk, the trauma dumping, the carefully calibrated text response times. I just wanted to skip to the end, to the part where you're already someone's safe harbor.
I closed the app, not just minimizing it, but quitting it entirely. I tossed my phone onto the duvet, where it landed with a soft, final thud, and just stared at the ceiling. The silence in my tiny apartment was deafening, amplified by the absence of all the potential conversations I wasn't having.
And in that overwhelming quiet, a new thought, softer than all the years of yearning, crept in: maybe you need to stop hunting. Maybe you need to just live.
So, I tried. It wasn't a sudden, dramatic movie montage—there was no immediate, serendipitous meeting involving dropped books and shared, knowing laughter. It was a slow, deliberate act of redirecting energy. I started saying yes to things without the hidden, desperate agenda of, "Will I meet him there?"
I started volunteering at the local animal shelter. My heart was often full of dog slobber and the quiet contentment of cleaning cat litter, but devoid of romantic tension. I also took a pottery class downtown, mostly because I'd always wanted to, and also because it felt thoroughly unlikely that the great love of my life would be standing next to a bag of dry clay.
I stopped looking at every interaction as a potential audition. The change wasn't instant, but it was cumulative. Slowly, subtly, my heart, no longer weighted down by the desperate need to find love, started to feel lighter, more open to the simple, everyday beauty around me.
One Saturday morning, while carefully applying a translucent turquoise glaze to a lumpy, misshapen bowl that was probably destined to become a decorative tragedy, the shift fully manifested.
A guy named Julian was working on the wheel next to me. He was perpetually covered in a fine layer of white clay dust, and he always smelled faintly of cinnamon and a subtle, earthy musk. He leaned over, his eyes crinkling behind his wire-rimmed glasses, and motioned to my handiwork.
"Hey," he whispered, needing to borrow my sponge, "is that going to hold water, or is it destined for the mantelpiece?"
He didn't ask about my job, my five-year plan, or my star sign. He just asked a simple, funny, observant question about the vessel in my hands.
And I laughed. A real, honest-to-god, deep-in-my-chest laugh that felt entirely unburdened.
We talked about ceramics, then about the terrible espresso from the coffee shop downstairs, then about the books we'd secretly reread a dozen times. It was easy. It was safe. There was no pressure, just two people sharing a quiet, dusty corner, covered in the evidence of their amateur failures and small, satisfying victories.
The class ended too soon. We walked out together and stood on the sidewalk, the city noise swirling around us, neither of us wanting to leave the bubble we'd accidentally created.
"Hey," Julian said, adjusting his glasses and pulling a piece of dried clay from his sweater sleeve. "I know this is cheesy, and maybe it's the fumes, but I feel like I've known you for a long time."
I smiled, feeling a warmth spread through me that had nothing to do with anxiety or expectation. "Maybe," I said softly, looking at the easy, uncomplicated man standing in front of me, "it's just because you stopped looking so hard."
He didn't know how right he was. I hadn't found love by hunting for it with a faulty compass; I'd found it when I was simply busy being Brian, covered in clay dust, making decorative tragedies. And it felt like everything I'd ever truly wanted. Simple. Honest. Real. A song without any forced high notes, just a perfect, steady melody.