Who Wrote That List for You?

“There is no one out there for me.” Have you ever built that sentence? I have heard it often; and when I hear it, I like to ask what someone “for you” would be like. The count begins at once. Cheerful but dignified, devoted to home but full of life, standing on her own feet but giving most of her time to me. The list grows and grows, and as you listen you notice something. Half the items are at war with the other half. I do not interrupt, I wait; when it ends I ask a single question: “When did you write this list?” The answer is always the same faltering. Because it was never written. Nobody writes it. The list arrives ready-made; we only memorize it. The woman who says the sentence and the man who says it are in the same condition; the items change, the memorized lesson does not. Both can recite the list by heart, and neither can point to the source of a single item.

Let me say it at the outset: expectation is not a bad thing. There is no person without expectations; whoever says “I expect nothing” is deceiving either themselves or you. Expectation is in fact a filter; it is what greets, at the door, whoever would enter your life. There is no door without a filter; nor should there be. The issue is not the expectation’s existence but its ownership. Whom you are drawn to, who affects you, whom you count “the right one” and whom you screen out; that list decides it all. If you did not write the list, you have handed one of the most important choices of your life to clerks whose names you do not even know.

And do not suppose this: it is assumed a list does not work unless it is written; quite the opposite, it works most efficiently in the dark. Whom you say your “heart slid toward,” whose message you await with excitement, whom you erase at the first sentence; the invisible list governs it all. So long as you are unaware, it rules without ever tiring; the day you become aware, the government changes.

The best-known symptom of the invisible list is this sentence: “I keep running into the same kind of people.” You do not run into them; they are selected. If, in a crowded room, you stand at the same distance from everyone yet your eye keeps catching on the same sort of person, someone has issued that eye an instruction. Who issued it, and when; that is the real question to ask. The person who says “I have no luck” is usually not unlucky; their list is old. And with an old list no new life is built.

So the first task is to write. Pen, paper, a quiet hour. Write whatever you seek in a partner; without sifting, without embellishing, without shame. Write the ones you find shallow too (“let him be handsome,” “let her be open-handed”) because the sifting comes later, and from a list not written honestly no honest sifting comes. Do not stop at five items; five items everyone has, the bottom of the memorized lesson runs deeper. Pass twenty, so that something rises from the bottom as well; the items that truly hold sway usually come last, when a person tires. That is all for the first round; you will show it to no one, write at ease. The real work begins in the second round: put a night in between, then come back and set against every item a single question. “Whose is this?”

Let me show with a few examples what I mean. “His job must be solid.” Is this yours? Or is it a fear passed down to you by a family, a circle, that saw lean times? Perhaps it is yours; security truly matters to you; or perhaps you would even settle for adventure, and the voice in your ear is someone else’s voice. “He will be tall.” Which height? Did you see that height in real life, or on a screen? To take the average of the heroes you watched for years for an expectation is to take a series budget for life. “He will hold me high in front of everyone.” Hold on: does this expectation work for you, or for the audience? The wish to be loved is yours; whose is the wish to be seen? And the most insidious: “She must never be jealous.” Why “never”? Is there no room even for a measured fondness? Beneath that “never” there usually lies an old story: this item is not an expectation, it is a scar; an old pain written in reverse. A scar makes no compass; that needle always points backward, and carries you not to tomorrow but to yesterday’s revenge.

At the end of this round the items fall into three piles. Those that are yours: expectations that grew out of your own life, whose reasons you can state in your own words. The inherited: those that came from family, from surroundings, from the screen, from culture. And the scars: your old pains written backwards. Do not throw the inherited straight into the bin; an inheritance need not be refused. But an inheritance is accepted by taking its inventory. In law they call it the estate: whoever says “I take it all” without knowing what remains takes the debts too. The inheritance of expectations is the same; in it there is what will genuinely serve you, and there is debt that will carry you to wrong doors for a lifetime. The sorting is done with a single question: would you write this item today, from scratch, with your own mind? If you would, it is now yours; an inheritance owned ceases to be inheritance. If you would not, be angry at no one; those who gave it to you were mostly not ill-meaning; they handed you the best map they had. The map belonged to their time, that is all.

There is one more round, the hardest. Some items are needs going about in the costume of expectations. “He will never leave me alone”; is this the description of a partner, or the advertisement of a life buoy? “She will always tell me how precious I am”; is this an expectation of love, or the contracting-out of a sentence you have never managed to say to yourself? Let us name the distinction: being attached and being dependent are different things. The attached person stands on their own feet and chooses the one beside them anew each day; the dependent person clings to the one beside them so as to stay standing; they do not choose, they are compelled. And where there is compulsion, love cannot breathe; dependency melts love away. Which one it is, you learn by the absence test: if that person left your life tomorrow, would you grieve, or would you collapse? Grieving is in love’s nature; you grieve after what you love; that is being human. Collapse is the result of having built your life not on your own foundation but on another’s shoulder. And however many items on your list promise collapse, they belong not to the description of a partner but to your own repair ledger. What you will ask of the one across from you is not to complete you; completing yourself is your own work. Their work is to accompany a person who is already whole.

Now I seem to hear the objection: “If the list shortens, won’t my standards drop?” Quite the reverse. Carrying someone else’s standard is not a high standard; it is a burden. And let me say this too, for I have observed it much: a long list looks like fastidiousness, but most of the time it is not; it is the polite way of never opening the door. No one matches a forty-item list; and when no one does, the fault stays outside: “there is no one out there for me.” We are back at the beginning; the sentence is the same sentence. Perhaps the list was that long for exactly this reason; the person who fears the risk of searching and the responsibility of finding turns the list into a castle wall. I cannot know; let everyone ask themselves.

When the sifting is done you will probably be left with three or five items. Do not fret at their fewness; those three or five do what forty could not; because all of them are yours, you know the reason for each one, and you now weigh the person who appears before you with your own eyes, not through others’ spectacles. A compass is small; it is still what steers the ship. One more thing happens, and it is the most beautiful: when the list is cleansed, the eye is cleansed too. You begin to notice people you had never noticed; they were always there; your old list was rendering them invisible. Whose fortune is closed and whose list is old; from outside the two look the same. Looking from within, the difference is great: for fortune there is nothing to be done; for a list, there is.

My question is this: if you wrote that list tonight; go on, write it; under how many of its items would you set your own signature with an easy heart, and from under how many would someone else’s signature emerge?