A dog boarder’s tagline caught my eye while I was taking myself on a walk: “Unconditional love goes both ways.” As those words tumbled around in my head, a realization eventually came to mind. “Oh. So that’s where I went wrong.”

Because, well, I’ve spent my whole life expecting someone else to be better at loving me than I am. Or maybe, better at loving themselves. Either way, I wanted a real life model of unconditional love that I could look up to and learn from. And maybe receive, if I could somehow hit that impossible emotional lottery. Sometimes I feel so lucky it can’t help but feel inevitable. And sometimes I feel stranded in an emotional desert, like I will always be alone in the ways that matter.

As a faith-filled teenager I found comfort in romanticizing divine grace: the attention of a God who cared about me even when humans seemed callously indifferent. And as an adult atheist, that’s been replaced by a platonic ideal of companionate love, which I’ve kept faith in for just as long (and with just as little evidence). But how can I ever exchange a feeling I can’t reciprocate? I know (all too well) that my own expression of what passes for love has a million ever-changing conditions. Be this kind of person. Act this way. Say this thing at this time and with this tone of voice. Touch me this way. No, not like that.

Never like that.

And yet somehow I've never found someone who acts on their own impulses to correct me, to refine me ever closer to their ideals of perfection. I’m not even sure my partners have those impulses. Instead, I date men who gaze at me awestruck, smart people gaping with the stupidest looks on their faces.

Don’t look at me like that.

Because they think I’m pretty great. And I think they’re pretty great too, for a while. Then it passes. But maybe it would come back, if you would just—

But it doesn’t come back. Trying to please me passes a test: you care. But it fails one too. Why are you trying to be different, when this is who you are and we both know that? Who exactly are you trying to fool? I see through you.

Don’t look at me.

But you aren’t looking anyway. You don’t see me, you see what I pretend to be. And I’m yearning for a stranger with your face, even when you’re right in front of me. We’re mirages in each others’ heads, reaching out to quench our thirsts for connection. In the end, it’s just more dry sand.