Love and Fiction
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
When I was younger, I used to worry that I didn't do romantic love correctly, because it only made sense to me when it was half fictional.
I feel like this is common for autistic people, actually - the idea that our special interests and our deepest desires for other people occupy some of the same brain circuits. Finding a new special interest feels a little like falling in love to me, and falling in love feels like finding a new special interest. But fiction isn't a special interest, in itself - it's more like an overarching framework through which all my special interests emerge.
Looking back, one of the common threads running through all my most intense loves is that they've had a fictional element.
The online friend who I pined for in high school, less because of anything to do with the boy himself, and more because of his terribly angsty, evil, over-the-top RP characters who I secretly related to.
The high school sweetheart who I fell for while we were collaborating on a short film (and, later, a MUD - I got into programming just so we could build a fictional world together. Now I have a PhD in computer science. That’s life.)
The boyfriend I played D&D with literally once before developing a hyperfixation on our characters, a dysfunctional pair of elf siblings. I kept writing and writing backstory for those characters long after the relationship fell apart.
The forbidden bad boy who figured out very quickly that the way to my heart was by making up kinky stories.
The online friend to whom I dedicated THE OUTSIDE and its sequels, because I had a terribly intense crush on him and his evil, shapeshifting D&D character, and he didn't return the crush but he loved to tell stories together, and I couldn't leave Akavi alone even after the campaign ended, and a whole science fiction trilogy sprang out of that.
The nesting partner who I met while LARPing, playing cat people, and bonded with by talking about our characters and their culture.
The sweet, shy partner who I wasn't sure of at first, until they shared a few songs with me that reminded them of their LARP character, and suddenly I felt like I understood their soul.
The girlfriend who I met through fanfiction - not just because we got excited about the same characters, but because when I blew off steam by writing torrents about those characters, she intuitively understood that on some level I was writing about myself, and she liked what she saw.
What I've come to understand is that fiction isn't an escape from reality, but a kind of funhouse mirror. We put things into stories that we aren't ready to consciously acknowledge: desires, fears, points of trauma and pain, thoughts about who we are or could be or about how the world around us seems to work. We put them there as symbols, and those symbols in turn can be read, by a savvy person with enough empathy and context, like Tarot cards or tea leaves. We can know each other through fiction, perhaps not better than through direct communication but differently, and that way of knowing suits me very well.
This is not a new idea. It has roots in Jungian psychoanalysis, where the figures who show up in myths, stories, and dreams are archetypes embodying our deepest human drives. It has reflections in the practice of art therapy, in which difficult feelings become easier to talk about through painting or music or fictional stories.
What I've learned is that my relationships need to exist on a fictional level. When we stop wanting to explore fictional characters and scenarios together, when one fictional way of relating to each other comes to an end and is not replaced, that's a sign that the spark between us is beginning to go out.
These days, I'm learning not to even bother with potential partners unless they can meet me in my imagination, where I'm strongest.
These days, after more than half a year together, my girlfriend and I have multiple sets of characters we share, multiple ongoing scenarios that we return to when we need particular sorts of meaning. We have a whole set of OCs just for the purpose of exploring what we want our dynamic to be. When we have the deepest conversations, we're constantly shifting between these frames, talking about ourselves one moment and talking metaphorically about our characters in another, with barely any transition. It's a way of communication that makes perfect sense to us. Somehow the hard truths hurt less this way, and yet they come across just as clearly and cut just as deep. And I feel so lucky that I've found someone who really sees this the way I do; who doesn't just play with me fictionally as a hobby or a nice thing to do together, but who sees building this kind of private world as one of the most romantic things it's possible to do.
What I've come to understand is that I'm not doing romantic love wrong.
I'm doing it my way.