Why The Right People Are Timeless

To be honest, I’m still not sure where I stand on the whole “meeting the right person at the wrong time” vs. “the right people are timeless” debate. It could go either way, honestly. You could meet the right person during a time where either one or both of you are in no place to commit or to take care of the other. You could meet the right person while you feel like you just need to focus on your career or your family. Or, like what happened to me, you could meet the right person while he’s still in love with someone else, and he can’t shake her, no matter how much he wants to, no matter how much he wants to be in love with you instead.

At the same time, the thought that the right people are timeless is so appealing and idealistic. We all have this notion that what’s meant to be will be, and that if God, or the universe, or whatever otherworldly being or deity you worship, puts someone in your life at this certain time, then this is the exact time they need to be in your life, and it’s the exact place they belong. Everything apparently has meaning, and nothing happens by accident. When you meet the right person, and if it really is the right person, then nothing is supposed to stop you two from being together. When you meet the right person, it shouldn’t matter that one of you is still getting over someone else, or that one of you is moving to the other side of the world, or any other external factor that neither of you have control over. Shouldn’t it be that simple? Shouldn’t two people be certain? Shouldn’t timing be irrelevant?

But, hypothetically, let’s say that I believed in timing, and how you really can meet the right person at the wrong time. You have the chemistry, you have the compatibility, but you also have shitty timing.

If I believed in timing, then I would be beating myself up right now. I would be beating myself up for not arriving in his life a mere two weeks earlier. Two weeks. I was two weeks late. I’m early for every single thing in my life, but for this, I had to be two weeks late. I hear him talk to my best friend about me and say, “Too bad, because she’s perfect. She’s so smart, so pretty, and so witty. If only she had come two weeks earlier. She would have been the one.” That makes me feel so much worse. Like I’m perfect theoretically, or on paper. But in real life? I’m lacking everywhere. It makes me feel like I’m supposed to be everything that would have made him forget the girl he’s so hung up over. I’m supposed to be enough to help him move on and be happy. I’m supposed to be enough. I’m supposed to be happy. We were supposed to be happy, if only I had come into his life two weeks earlier.

I feel like I’m the kind of person who is built up so much and made to seem perfect, but when people actually get to know me, I’m bound to disappoint them because the way I was packaged makes me seem like I have it all, like I have it together, like I’m supposed to make anyone in my life unbelievably happy, because I seem so flawless, right? Damn wrong. I’m like one of those dresses you see in the window of a storefront that looks amazing on the mannequin, but when someone actually tries it on, it makes them look fat, or it doesn’t fit right, or there was just something off about it, and they leave disappointed, because they thought they had actually found something that would make them happy. But oh my God, I am the farthest you could get from perfect.

Please don’t look at my intelligence, or my looks, or even my humor. Look at my impatience, my impulsiveness, my laziness, my vanity, and my selfishness. I dare you to look at all that and repeat what you said about how I could have been the one. But you can’t do that, right? You can’t even see any of that, you can’t see me for my actual flawed self, because you can’t even give yourself a chance to get to know me, you can’t give me a chance to show you who I really am. All you saw was the shiny, carefully-packaged, seemingly perfect exterior, and if that’s your basis for who was supposedly “the one” for you, then I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m quite what you’re looking for.

And maybe that’s how I know that you weren’t the right person for me, in the same way that I wasn’t the right person for you.

So I’m sorry, but I refuse to believe in something that will then lead me to look down on myself and make me seem even more flawed than I already am. I refuse to think that the “right” people who come into your life at the wrong time only see you for what you want them to see. Because I know that the genuinely “right” person will see past my façade, right through to my scratched, dented, close-to-breaking, ugly insides, and still think that I’m the perfect one for them. And they’ll love me even more for who I really am, not who I want them to think I am.

Okay, now I know what I believe in.

The right people are timeless.

And you just weren’t the right person.