When You Fall for a Man Who's Exactly Like You

My boyfriend, Norman, introduced me to H because our book shelves and CD folders were identical. We were two assholes in a pod, so when I broke up with Norman, H was the first person I called. Thus followed a five-year love story replete with an engagement to be married. In those days, I stopped bothering to look for new music or books. H had the same taste as I did, so when my favourite artists released albums, I only listened to the tracks he added to our playlist.

Even years after we broke up, I continued to listen to H’s songs—all while swearing I’d never meet a man quite as perfect as he was. We had the same opinions. We loved doing the same things. We were sexual doppelgangers: He was slightly kinky, but mostly vanilla just like me.

“Why do you think it’s better to love a man who’s exactly like you?” my friend, Janese, would say. I couldn’t really answer her. You only understand when you’ve been there, so I cried over H for many years, never bothering to date anyone else. I thought I’d run out of Mister Rights.

Somewhere between then and now, I discovered a song I’d never heard from my favourite artist. It was sublime. It launched a grand YouTube search for everything else I’d been missing from H’s playlists. The answer? A whole bloody lot. Album after album showed me he had gotten a lot of things wrong. He wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t even exactly like me. I still had growing to do, and until he’d left, it wasn’t possible because we were two assholes in a pod.

And we were assholes, by the way. That’s not a cute throwaway line. Neither of us was capable of intimacy. Neither of us really engaged with the world around us. We preferred dark rooms and a whole lot of marijuana—and almost-vanilla-but-slightly-kinky sex, of course.

I met E while I was absorbing every track in every album Radiohead had ever released. He wasn’t slightly-kinky-but-mostly-vanilla. He was a sadistic dominant with a penchant for degradation and rope. In his presence, I grew and grew. He taught me about blues. He taught me about jazz. He taught me about BDSM.

After E, there was J—a sadistic-but-not-very-dominant man with the integrity of a Nobel Peace Prize. J couldn’t teach me about music, but he did take me to a dog shelter to walk floofs on Valentine’s Day. I was never the same after that. I began looking outside myself. I became a regular volunteer who actually cared about my community.

These days, I remember how very small I was when I was with H. We were the same, it’s true, but only because neither of us had finished growing. He has a child, now, and I don’t care what music he listens to these days because nobody can top the blues or the slide guitar E introduced me to.

He is far too vanilla and far too disinterested in the world around him. He is, to put it simply, not like me at all, and thank god for that.