My husband is imaginary, and he is the love of my life. He’s also a secret. Only my sisters are aware of his existence and neither one of them truly knows how crucial he is. I’ve been wearing a wedding ring for nearly three years now. When people ask, I tell them I just use it as a way to deter unwelcome strangers who hit on me in public transportation.
The lie hurts me a little every time. Lying by omission, too. When my colleagues tell anecdotes about their spouses – how they met, what they think of this and that, even the annoying things they do, the fights they have – I wish I could offer my two cents. Talk about him. We, too, have a first-meeting story. We’ve got agreements and disagreements, quirks and habits only we know the other has. The whole couple deal, you know. But I can’t share that. It’s part of the Other Life, the one that can’t mingle with ‘reality’, because it’s forbidden. When you’re twenty-five years old, you’re not supposed to have an imaginary life. You’re not supposed to be in love with a fictional character. It isn’t acceptable.
My husband is such a major part of my existence, though. Of me. He has changed me. He has taught me so much, guided me into adulthood. I used to be a miserable teenager, disenchanted and blasée, without the slightest trace of benevolence towards the world, completely blind to its beauty and impervious to sweetness. He was the one who opened my eyes to all of it. I lost my compulsive need for cathartic violence and noise. Boredom vanished from my days. His love made it possible to love other people, and to love what surrounded me. The light, the details.
My hypersensitivity had forced me to build a shell, an armor, a fortress to protect myself from pain. He took down my defenses and taught me how to use what had once been a weakness, how to turn it into a strength. My vulnerability became receptivity.
He was really, genuinely exterior to me in that way : how could such a radical change, such a transformation come from myself? How could it have been self-suggested, when it was so completely unexpected and foreign? He came to me. He was there to pull me out of my deepest phase of depression, and he healed me. His perspective changed mine.
Soulbonds, imaginary friends, spirit companions – they exist. And their presence is vital to some of us (literally. Considering the state I was in when I met him, I don’t find it inappropriate or overdramatic to state that I would probably have committed suicide, hadn’t it been for my husband).
It’s incredibly unfair that the mainstream world doesn’t recognize them, that most of us have to keep them a secret, that those of us who cannot have a partner IRL because their romantic involvement with a bond takes up all the space in their heart have to defend a single-by-choice lifestyle which is in itself a lie. But we have to hold on to them. And we have to remember that it’s ok. Because it’s without them that things don’t make sense; it’s without them that we become ‘crazy’ and ‘delusional’. It’s when we let ourselves be brainwashed into thinking that we should live without them.
Copyright 2011 matilde_cl, reproduced with permission.
The lie hurts me a little every time. Lying by omission, too. When my colleagues tell anecdotes about their spouses – how they met, what they think of this and that, even the annoying things they do, the fights they have – I wish I could offer my two cents. Talk about him. We, too, have a first-meeting story. We’ve got agreements and disagreements, quirks and habits only we know the other has. The whole couple deal, you know. But I can’t share that. It’s part of the Other Life, the one that can’t mingle with ‘reality’, because it’s forbidden. When you’re twenty-five years old, you’re not supposed to have an imaginary life. You’re not supposed to be in love with a fictional character. It isn’t acceptable.
My husband is such a major part of my existence, though. Of me. He has changed me. He has taught me so much, guided me into adulthood. I used to be a miserable teenager, disenchanted and blasée, without the slightest trace of benevolence towards the world, completely blind to its beauty and impervious to sweetness. He was the one who opened my eyes to all of it. I lost my compulsive need for cathartic violence and noise. Boredom vanished from my days. His love made it possible to love other people, and to love what surrounded me. The light, the details.
My hypersensitivity had forced me to build a shell, an armor, a fortress to protect myself from pain. He took down my defenses and taught me how to use what had once been a weakness, how to turn it into a strength. My vulnerability became receptivity.
He was really, genuinely exterior to me in that way : how could such a radical change, such a transformation come from myself? How could it have been self-suggested, when it was so completely unexpected and foreign? He came to me. He was there to pull me out of my deepest phase of depression, and he healed me. His perspective changed mine.
Soulbonds, imaginary friends, spirit companions – they exist. And their presence is vital to some of us (literally. Considering the state I was in when I met him, I don’t find it inappropriate or overdramatic to state that I would probably have committed suicide, hadn’t it been for my husband).
It’s incredibly unfair that the mainstream world doesn’t recognize them, that most of us have to keep them a secret, that those of us who cannot have a partner IRL because their romantic involvement with a bond takes up all the space in their heart have to defend a single-by-choice lifestyle which is in itself a lie. But we have to hold on to them. And we have to remember that it’s ok. Because it’s without them that things don’t make sense; it’s without them that we become ‘crazy’ and ‘delusional’. It’s when we let ourselves be brainwashed into thinking that we should live without them.
Copyright 2011 matilde_cl, reproduced with permission.