#44 When I Found My Parasocial Soulmate

I wasn't really looking for love

Hi!

I’m still on an indefinite break from writing regular newsletters, but I wanted to come back to honor my tradition of sharing a birthday essay.

I chipped away at this piece painstakingly for about nine months — the longest time I’ve given myself to write something — so, honestly, at this point, I’m excited to just finally let it out into the world.

Thank you for being here. For trusting me with your e-mail address, your time, your energy — birthday gifts I’ll never take for granted!

---

The author on that fateful Eurotrip

I Liked Him Better as My Parasocial Soulmate

When I discovered my Writer Crush online, I was a rookie writer, a Filipina teaching herself to write while trying to make it in a Western-dominated publishing platform. I had no formal writing education, no byline, no audience. All I had was a steep learning curve ahead of me — one that I planned to surmount by scouring the internet for every morsel of writing advice and motivation.

So I found a crush. After all, a crush, to quote an anonymous Twitter sage, “is the most renewable energy source in the world.”

He lived in Europe. And I lived in the rabbit hole of his words. I wouldn’t have minded dying there, too, buried in all the reasons I loved his work: His writing voice, so lucid and tender. His craftsmanship. His striking ability to balance reason and emotion. In his words, I saw a man with a strong head on his shoulders.

In his words, I also saw, well, myself. And yet, I could never describe our congruent worldviews as well as he did. Reading his work felt like going from eyeglasses that were one level short of the prescription to perfect vision. He articulated my world better than I could, which in some way, felt as if he understood me better than I understood myself.

Such is the mystique of a parasocial relationship: He spurred me on with his talent, with the sensation of him seeing through me. All he had to do was exist online.

One day, he published an essay that came for my entire soul I couldn’t resist reaching out. “I’m Ria, a writer from the Philippines!”, I e-mailed him for the first time. “You’re my favorite online writer!”

I told him his piece helped me crystallize something I’d been working on. Then, I shot my shot: “If you have the time, I'd be super thankful if you could give feedback on my draft.”

And he did. He helped me, a nobody.

The fundamental flaw of my draft, he said, was that I was conflating two points. “They are related but different.”

By then I’d thoroughly excavated his digital footprint, so it was easy for me to sustain the conversation using our common interests: Marvel references, books, European things. I asked which team he was rooting for in Formula 1, because doesn’t being European mean you’re a fan? (He didn’t follow F1.)

As we migrated from e-mail to Twitter DMs, I felt more at home in my flattery. “You’re a professional writer and business founder with an online empire and a book on the way”, I told him as he admitted he didn’t know how to change his oil. “It would be unfair to us all if you also knew how to do an oil change.” When he asked for my preference on potential book covers and he chose otherwise, I quipped: “Oh, it’s okay! I mean you just lost Ria’s Favorite Writer status, that’s all. 😜”

I began to wonder: Was all this fawning plain fandom? Or was I flirting?

Then I’d slap myself with the facts: He lived 6,000 miles away from me. Plus: He had a girlfriend.

I thought, so what if it was borderline flirting? It’s not like anything would ever come of this. Totally harmless.

Besides, I’d been here before, in this gray area between admiration and romantic attraction. It was simply inevitable territory given my type: Men better than me. Men with more skill. More swag. More sure of who they were.

Things I wish I had more of.

My Writer Crush began to read my work, too. At one point, he told me, “I see a lot of myself from a few years ago in your writing”, which sent me to a higher plane of existence in the same way when my ex-boss, who I thought could do no wrong and had a tiny crush on, called me a “diamond" – a little rough on the edges, but precious nonetheless. On both occasions, I remembered what Nike founder Phil Knight said about his ex-boss in his memoir Shoe Dog. Knight looked up to him, yes, “but I loved him when he saw something special in me.”

Near the end of the year, I asked my Writer Crush for notes on another essay. This time he responded through a four-part voice message on WhatsApp. After marveling at his brain and thanking him, my grin audible in the recording, I sat down to rework my draft.

But I couldn’t think straight. I felt self-conscious – the way you would when you could feel your crush’s eyes boring into you. Suddenly, reminders of him having a girlfriend caused twinges in my chest.

That’s when I finally conceded: My crush on him had blown past harmless.

I had no plans of watching this turn into unrequited love — much less a long-distance one — so to temper my feelings, I did what I did best. I wrote them out. In an e-mail to the advice column Dear Sugar, I confessed: “I’ve read so much of his work it makes me feel like I really know him. And the thing is, it’s like he knows me, too… I don’t know what it means to say that someone is your Soulmate, but with the way we connect, I can hardly find a word more suitable.”

As it happened, I was going on my first solo trip in a few months. To Europe. As it also happened, one of the cities in my itinerary was a two-hour train from where my Writer Crush lived. I thought, Why not put my feelings to bed? Who knows? Maybe we wouldn’t click as well as I thought we would.

He agreed to meet me on the last day of my trip. I booked my flight home from his city.

Then, after settling the plan, something shifted. He intensified. Planning our day trip, he asked, “Are you an ‘I love surprises’ person or an ‘Oh god tell me what it is upfront’ person?”

“I love surprises!”, I typed, smirking at my phone.

Then came more intimate questions: Did I believe in fate? What was my biggest dream? Was I considering moving to Europe? I reserved the last waking hours of my day to chat with him, both of us fervently responding with screen-long responses. I thought that if our messages were any indication of our real-life chemistry, our day together would be nothing short of a Richard Linklater Before movie.

Right as we were chatting about films, he suddenly said: “Okay Ria, at the risk of torpedoing this wonderful conversation, I have to send something. I’m sorry it took me so long.” I clicked the following link; it was a private file titled “The Truth”.

And the truth, as he elaborated in 2,000 words, was he had feelings for me.

I might’ve forgotten to breathe as I read it, dazed by feeling the full prowess of his writing directed at me. Then I forgot to think altogether and immediately sent him my Dear Sugar letter.

“I can’t believe you used the S-word, too”, he messaged. To describe our connection, I guess he could neither find a word more suitable.

In the following days, we attempted to proceed with as much caution as two people high on the possibility of having just landed their soulmate can, which is to say: not well. Screw being sleep-deprived and emotionally charged. We were decided. We would meet each other and try to make something of the undeniable connection we had. And so things progressed fast.

But not as fast as the unraveling. Five days after he confessed The Truth, I woke up to his message that began: “I’m sorry, Ria, but I can’t do this.”

I might as well have been hit by a train.

Confused and outraged, I demanded to settle things in person. “Of the ten thousand conversations I imagined having with you that I will never have”, I messaged him, “I hope you can give me at least this.” Seen.

Two weeks later, I flew to Europe. Thankfully, the thrill of being a first-time solo traveler crowded out the heartache. That is, until my penultimate day.

I messaged my friend: “Oh god. I’m suddenly feeling the weight of it.”

“You’ll carry it well.”

36,000 steps in two-inch booties | Photo from the author

In my ex-Fave Writer’s city, I marched through the crisp springtime air in two-inch booties as if I wasn’t acclimated to a tropical country, as if I had no care in the world where he was. I walked by the WeWork he said he frequented. In a mockingly idyllic court garden, I watched locals playing an unfamiliar game and wished he was there to explain it to me.

In the wake of our misconnection, I was devastated by so much dissonance in my head: How can a man so measured on paper be so mercurial? How can the person I looked up to be such a monumental letdown? How could he be so off base from who I thought he’d be?

Years of being enamored with men possessing traits I found lacking in me have trained me this much: I would create a sheen out of their most dazzling parts and cast it over who they are, and whatever they had underneath that sheen, I deemed irrelevant.

This, I realize, is why we’re told never to meet our heroes. Because from a distance, you can blissfully remain ignorant of all the ways they aren’t one.

But my Writer Crush wouldn’t let me do that. Three months after my trip, we reconnected over e-mail where he gave me a 6,000-word play-by-play of his side of the story. He told me how he was racked with personal insecurity and relationship anxiety, how he was running on little emotional reserve, rendering him unable to cope and much less make good decisions.

I resented him for forcing me to face the truth: He, like any human being, was deeply flawed and fallible. In fact, he had cautioned me about this early on: “I don’t know what writer-me looks like in your head, but the real me is not half as polished.”

Now, two years later, I read his e-mail understanding who was the one who was off-base. It wasn’t him. Now, his missive registers no longer as an inconceivable mismatch between expectation and reality, but a plea: “Please see the real me.”

It’s intoxicating, both the prospect of being seen and seeing someone. But maybe it’s more elusive than we think, despite how much access we assume we have to other’s lives. Maybe that’s exactly what we need to be wary of lest we start conflating things, like mistaking knowing a person’s work with truly knowing them.

Because real love, I realize now, is anchored on real intimacy. It’s a lesson I’ve pinned in my head as I talk to someone new, grounding me as I yearn to know him, taming the pull of romanticizing. I remind myself, too, that intimacy takes time.

And as he lets me into the recesses of his mind, all I can think of is: Yes, show me everything.

All your best. And all your bruises.