This post is dedicated to @omfedor who recently encouraged me to write something more uplifting and personal. He reminded me that being vulnerable is a good thing to do. I had gotten so involved with the Secret Writer project, that I think I was losing some valuable things, hiding my true self inside of strangers' secrets. I was and am living vicariously through other people's pain. I think I am a masochist. That's the driving force behind the Secret Writer project. It fulfills my need for pain, so the secret writers are not the only ones who benefit. Their pain feeds my need to re-experience pain. Their relief, too, I get to experience that as well. It's a good thing, for everyone, I guess.

And even if Steemit were to crash and burn, I'd still do the Secret Writer project. I was doing it for free on Medium even before Steemit existed. Some people go out into the world looking for huge amounts of pleasure. I did this, too. Now, I go out into the world looking for pain.

Many people have asked for my own secrets, so I'm going to reveal the one that broke me.

I'm one of those people who has decided to "opt out" of love for the time being. Like completely. It is no secret that I literally have not been touched in a romantic way for 7 years. I have never dealt with relationships very well, and the whole thing feels too uncomfortable. If I die alone, I feel that I will be okay. I am not terribly worried about such a possibility mainly because I have life missions which are calling me, which are beyond the scope of my own desires. Putting desires on hold is a practice of which I've gotten pretty good at. It's like I'm a nun, but I'm atheist, so I'm not sure how that works, an atheist nun? I've never been a fan of labels, actually, so even atheist doesn't work. I like mysteries, data, nature, art, technology. I like them all and could never choose just one.

So, here is my story of how my heart was broken and how I believe I have never loved this deeply again. Something changed, was hardened after this experience.

I’ve come to realize my experience with romantic love was manufactured from a deep desire to believe romantic love existed. I willed it into existence from the depths of my soul. I have a concrete example of this.

I fell in love very hard with an artist when I was 18 years old.

He was a painter who was three years older than I. He was from Los Angeles, I am from a small midwestern town in Missouri. His family was very hip and his mother was a travel agent whose clients were famous celebrities in Hollywood.

I met him in Tokyo, Japan, when I was an Elite model. He was an artist, very opinionated, witty and had an intensity about him. He was critical, unwavering and yet, he was extremely sensitive, highly emotional. He possessed something I didn’t: raw self-expression. I was jealous of his ability to express himself.

I was a closed-off, secretive person who was afraid of everything. He was the opposite of me.

One time, while we were exploring a Japanese village, we witnessed an old woman throwing down three screaming kittens to the ground.

It traumatized my lover and he ran away by himself, behind some trees, tears streaming down his face. I reacted with stoicism, as was my nature at the time. He couldn’t talk to me for a while, he was so upset by seeing the kittens abused. Sometimes, I felt he was tortured, or at least manufactured being tortured. I was completely overtaken by his emotions all the time. I listened to him with rapturous, hungry ears. I loved his free expression because I was shut off, shy and really didn’t know who I was. I felt like he was my teacher in art, expression and literature. He was always reading a book or two.

Our relationship was romantic, emotional and intellectual in nature. It had all 3 elements.

But we never had sex. We kissed and were intimate, but he respected my wishes to not engage in intercourse. I was a virgin at the time, and sex just seemed too problematic for me. I didn't want to get pregnant and I was ignorant about all the stuff associated with not getting pregnant. But he was the first man I let touch my breasts. That was a big deal to me. So, in many ways, I consider him to be my first love, the first person I let inside my secret worlds. He was the first person who made me feel alive in a creative aspect, who provided me with the answers I had been so much in search of with regard to self-expression and passion and art and creativity.

Even while I was with him, I could feel myself slipping.

I wanted his approval and I remember that his influence over me was powerful. I began to see the world through his tortured, artistic lenses. I felt his pain, pleasure and everything he experienced. My love for him was all-consuming as I had never met someone like him before. He was physically beautiful, too. He had blue eyes and a perfect face. I tried to hide my passion for him for I knew it was too much to be normal.

(he actually looks a lot like this actor)

My contract ended in Japan and we promised each other that we would meet in the USA.

We wrote feverish, ridiculously long letters to each other when we went back to the USA and we arranged future plane tickets and trips.

His letters to me were like his diaries from a secret world. They weren’t overly drippy with love confessions. They were more like his intimate thoughts about the world and what was going on in his mind. Oh, how I loved his curious mind! It was so strange and wonderful to have access to an unfiltered brain! And he could write. His style reminded me of Bukowski, as his wit was biting and his words were not clouded with flowery language.

Our letters continued for quite some time. And our passion was still there. But slowly, the letters became less frequent and after he visited me, being my high school prom date, where he wore a kilt and I wore a tuxedo, our correspondance dwindled.

Now here is where even I don't understand. I never wanted it to die. And I don't even know why it did.

I think I began to dread that he would lose interest in me. When his letters became less frequent, it disturbed me. The thought of him not being passionate about me drove me to insanity. I began to lose my grip on reality. And at this point, I began to shut down internally. The fear took over and I began to see that my feelings for him were not quite there in him for me. This was a terrible reality to face. I stopped eating.

Somewhere in my naive understanding of romantic love, I believed that the artist’s love for me was true.

It wasn’t. I don't think it was.

I have evidence. I think I was a dalliance, a muse. I was an eighteen year-old virgin from the midwest who knew very little of the world. He was jaded, from Los Angeles, in art school and regularly sculpted giant hands gripping giant penises (he showed me his masturbation sculpture later, which shocked the hell out of me.)

In my naive and disillusioned mind, I believed that at some time in the future we would be together. I held on to that passion for years, and it even influenced who I decided to lose my virginity with. I chose someone who looked like him, and who was a drunk poet. I didn't love the drunk poet, I still loved the artist, and the drunk poet was as close physically as I could get to the artist. I used the drunk poet to just get the whole virgin thing out of the way. I was around 21 years old and was tired of being a virgin. The experience was bad. He was drunk, and mumbling his shitty poetry.

Flash Forward to 2016

I looked up the artist thirty years later on Facebook and I think I may have written to him. I'm sure I wrote to him but I cannot remember what I said.

He wanted nothing to do with me.

The reality is as far as I can tell: I was his muse for a short time, that is all. He didn’t think of me in the same way I thought of him. I was a dalliance, a virgin. I was probably an oddity to him. He liked me, I think, but he didn’t like me the way I liked him. This was a sad memory to revisit. And the harder truth to admit to myself: I’ve never loved anyone again in the way I loved him.

I’ve never had sex with anyone I truly loved.

But now that I realize he didn’t love me in the way I had imagined in my 18 year-old brain, it’s really horrible. It’s like death and betrayal. It makes me realize I manufactured the entire experience.

This is the reality of romantic love. It’s not real. It doesn’t last. It’s painful because it’s in the process of ending. Always ending. It cannot be captured, realized or made real. It’s not real. It exists in the mind. It’s a phantom. A hallucination. It’s an idea. A painful idea that experienced usually within one person, not two. One light, going off in one mind. That's romantic love. Or in my case, one smoke bomb, going off in an empty field.

I recently looked through all his Facebook photos and discovered he was involved with a young student (she looked like she was in her early 20’s, he is at least 48). She was very beautiful. I was horrified. I realized he’s still trapped in the hunt for his next young and beautiful female muse. I was somehow expecting to find him with a wife, or maybe kids. Instead, I found him with a young girl, a pretty young thing, and she is someone who could have been myself, from 30 years ago.

I felt sick.

It was at that moment that I released all my memories of romantic love with him. The pedestal I once put him on collapsed before my eyes. I could see that he is a sham. In a flash of understanding, I realized my existence did not matter to this man. He is still falling in love with women a quarter of his age. This is not an attractive man. This sort of man is gross to me.

I have come to the conclusion that romantic love is a mental fabrication and that it possibly doesn't even exist in the modern technological era.

The development of romantic love depends upon two people’s ability to cultivate enormous amounts of passion for each other. In order to develop passion, there has to be obstacles to being together. Technology has obliterated the obstacles. You can reach anyone instantly, no matter where they live.

Romantic love and the cultivation of it require abstinence, longing, desire and an ethereal, ungraspable feeling of connection.

During episodes of romantic love, no one has to do mundane things like cooking dinner unless it’s an absurdly elaborate display of food, prepared for an object of desire. (A Chinese man once made me such a dinner and even though I understand the rapture of doing over-the-top things for a muse, I was a bit revolted by his effusive offerings at the time because I had not developed concepts of romantic love at that time).

Romantic Love has become a fast-food operation.

It will continue to become more like technological fast food in the coming years.

People will increasingly turn to technology to satisfy their every whim, and romantic love will be no exception. But let's just discuss how it is today.

Prepackaged gifts “from the heart” come from Walgreens, Hallmark, Tiffany’s and Hollywood. The “lover” gives nothing of his or her authentic self, but merely purchases a good which is then transferred to the current object of his or her desire. It’s a cold transaction. There’s absolutely no real passion in such a transference. There is the distinct possibility that a majority of adults have lost the self-knowledge required in order to express their authentic feelings of love. Being authentic and expressing real emotions has become passé in the modern age. Most people just buy something, or send a text. Most do what is the fastest, cheapest and the lowest denominator in value. Much like fast food. Also, people are treated like fast food meals, too. If someone has even the slightest thing wrong with them, they can be discarded instantly. People are so easy to access, that an app is utilized, and another person can be found instantly. People are on menus all over the app world.

I opt out.