Why I’ll End Up With Smelly Thomas

Thomas smells weird. Inge’s got a blemish. At a certain age you have standards about these things. You’re waiting for someone better, someone without the flaws, the baggage, the accumulated weight of another person’s damage. That someone doesn’t exist, but you don’t know it yet.

Years move through you. The internal bouncer that was filtering your choices just stops showing up. And suddenly smelly Thomas looks fine, the blemish means nothing, and you’re living a life you didn’t choose—walking a park with someone you picked partly by accident, partly by running out of time, with two kids who inherited the smell.

So why try at all? Why compromise, adjust, swallow humiliation? Why keep showing up when you know it’ll probably end in silence?

Because love is brain damage. Butterflies. Waking and the light is right. You believe in forever, actually believe it, for those opening months. Only the truly hopeless think about what comes after—the fights, the slow distance, the moment you realize this person is just another person—when you’re still in that beginning.

I’ve had relationships that felt necessary and then weren’t. Some were wrong from day one. Some burned clean through. I know heartbreak well enough to see it coming, and I’ve lived through it anyway. Multiple times. I know what it costs.

And I’ll do it again. Not because I believe in happy endings or that this time is different. But because being alone at forty-five feels worse than loving wrong. Not worse emotionally. Worse as a failure. The failure of not trying rather than trying and losing.

That’s probably not good enough as a reason. But it’s the only one I can live with.