From the moment we became real friends (there is always a threshold over which you cross into something true — you will know exactly when it happens), I waited for her to meet the love of her life.
We got to know each other by chance, introduced by a mutual friend even though we should, by all means, have already known each other beforehand since we inhabited the same circles. In Manila, those circles are often too small and extremely concentric. In the Manila I live in, all the girls like us know each other. But we met at the right time, at the perfect point in both our lives for our friendship to become so much more than the surface-level acquaintanceship we were accustomed to.
It’s a rare thing, to meet someone almost exactly like you. I have always felt lonely in Manila. I have always been a little strange, a little out of the ordinary. I always tried to find myself in other places because I didn’t feel free enough to know myself here. My lived experience always felt so singular — no one in my life really understood it in its fullness before her, although others certainly tried. (And I loved them for trying.) I didn’t know anyone else who lived it, too.
She knew me immediately. She is one of the kindest, most generous, most loving, and most loyal people I’m fortunate to know. We were both recovering from bad romances. And she was the person who told me I needed a list.
“Babe,” she said, “you need to know what you want in a partner. I know exactly what I want. I’m unwilling to compromise on those points. I’m not going to take anyone seriously until they tick all those boxes.”
I was there when she finally met the man who ticked all those boxes: a kind man, purpose-driven, as loving and ambitious and hardworking as the father she adored. Someone whose hopes and dreams extended beyond himself, who wanted to serve his country and his people, but still had more than enough room for her and her own dreams. An equal who treated her like a queen. None of us knew then, least of all her; it was an ordinary night out on the town. No one expected it.
Who ever expects to go to a club and meet the love of their life?
I never felt worthy of a list — a symptom of my condition, probably. A popular young adult novel says that we accept the love we think we deserve. The misfiring synapses in my brain always told me I didn’t deserve any, that I was lucky to get whatever paltry shadow of love came my way. I am still working today to correct that. I think I’m getting better at it.
But in 2017, because she told me to, I started a list. It is in my phone, tucked away in my Notes with things like my passport details, bank information, quotes I have loved, and movies people have told me I need to see. I always felt a bit embarrassed about it (I don’t know why — perhaps because we’re conditioned in this day and age to shunt vulnerability aside), but after every heartbreak, I added to it little by little. I suppose I had to learn through experience — trial and excruciating error — what I really wanted from a long-term partner by living through what I didn’t want in a partner.
It’s a hard way to learn. I don’t recommend it.
But I do recommend learning. I recommend that you learn this particular lesson as early as you can.
In August, I returned to Manila from my annual summer trip to Berlin to the realisation that I’d developed feelings I never wanted to have for my Two-Year Stand; feelings I knew that he was absolutely incapable of ever reciprocating. I missed him while I was away, and I fucking hated that I did. It felt like weakness. It felt like defeat. I felt like I’d lost, because in the game of not-quite-love, the first one to catch feelings is always the loser, and I had done that which I never thought I would do: I fucking lost.
I hate losing. I never fucking lose.
But also, I returned home to the realisation that I could no longer delude myself into believing that whatever it was we were doing would ever be enough for me. I could no longer tell myself that it wasn’t a waste of my time, a waste of my heart. And I could no longer pretend that I didn’t want more — with someone else who might actually be capable of giving back as much as I myself kept giving.
“It’s no one’s fault,” I told him then, as I was ending it, “that we want different things. I want the things that I want, you want the things that you want, and those things are no longer compatible. It is what it is. But for as long as I stay in this, I’m not ever going to make space for the things that I do want, that I know I deserve, that you won’t — can’t — give me.”
I wanted to stay friends. After two years, and despite our best efforts, our lives and our friendships had become a little too intertwined to unravel and separate. It was a tall order, but I wanted to try.
In September, she told me about something he was trying to keep from me that devastated me inside. It was a feeling I’m sad to admit I was used to — he’d completely disregarded my feelings before. But that was a time when any disrespect towards me was just a hit on my pride, because I had no real feelings for him. It had become much more than that, now that I — despite myself — did. It wasn’t just my ego any longer. It was a real hurt.
“I need you to remember,” said the girl with the list, because she could read me like a book, “that you told me the day after you met him that you didn’t think you would ever introduce him to your parents. I need you to remember that you already knew two years ago that he absolutely wasn’t the one for you. This is just more proof.”
Later that night, when I went home, I thought of him and of every other man — boy, child — who had broken my heart in one way or another, and I added to my list. Because I finally understood that I deserved to have a list, too.
I needed one, so that I would never allow anyone to make me feel like that again.
Small, unlovable, insufficient, replaceable, unworthy. Even I knew, in spite of all my self-loathing, that I was none of those things.
How dare a man have the audacity to make me feel that way?
How dare I permit one to?
In October, on a Girls’ Night In, I read my list out loud for the first time.
And now I am writing it out here, because we should never be afraid to ask for the things we want, because we should never be afraid to establish healthy boundaries to protect ourselves, because we should never be afraid to say, this is what I deserve. Because we should never settle for less than that, and if a list helps to remind us of our worth, then it’s good to have one.
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Regina Belmonte 