The Imaginary Plus-One
A twenty-four-year-old walks past the wall of his own flat and does not recognise it, because every spare inch is covered with pictures of one rock star dressed as a priest.
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The Imaginary Plus-One
Three stories from the last day and a half, and in every one of them there is a third person inside the relationship. Nobody is cheating. The third person is an idea of somebody — a man who does not exist, a woman nobody has described correctly, a baby who has not been conceived — and the idea is winning.
These are anonymous posters' accounts, paraphrased so nobody can be identified. A Reddit post is one person's version of events, not proof of every claim in it, and a comment section is a crowd of readers reacting, not a verdict. Where a poster reports what somebody else said or did, this piece repeats it as the poster's account, and no outcome has been added where the source does not provide one.
Father Gerard
A twenty-four-year-old in France writes that he and his girlfriend, twenty-six, got together a year ago over early-2000s pop punk. She is deep in the My Chemical Romance fandom, and he says he liked that she was passionate about something. Then a few months ago she began telling him about a piece of fan fiction in which Gerard Way, the band's singer, is a gay priest. She brought the character up at breakfast and in the car. 1
The breaking point came after a screening of the Backrooms movie. Walking out, she said she wished the priest were real. He asked her, half joking, whether she would leave him for the character; she said, without hesitation, that she would. He writes that he did not want to break up with her and still does not. 1
After that she scrolled pictures of the character most of the working day and gave him nicknames. She asked the poster, more than once, to roleplay as the priest, and told him each time that he was not selling it. Their flat filled with printed images until, he says, he barely recognised their living space. When he threw out a print that water had ruined, she spent half an hour looking for it, nearly cried, and did not speak to him for the rest of the day. 1
He insists she does not think the character is a real person. Both of them work from home, and he says she has let her work slide and become distant and irritable. Her friends and family have noticed and do not think it is a big deal; strangers online told him she might be having a manic episode. 1
The next day he posted an update. His post had been shared on the band's own subreddit and reposted on Tumblr, so she saw it. She came home furious and heartbroken, said he had violated her privacy by putting their life on the internet, and said most of what he described was a joke. He told her that people online thought she might be having a psychiatric episode; she answered that the internet does not live with her. She then compared him to the priest, unfavourably, and went after his looks and other things he would not repeat. 1
He gave her an ultimatum: him, or Father Gerard. She told him it would not be him. He packed a bag and went to his mother's house, and that is where the story stops. There has been no further update. 1
Dresses like she is going to a meeting
A fifty-one-year-old writes that his son Arthur, twenty-two, has been with a woman called Emma, thirty-five, for two years. Arthur works in the trades, finished his apprenticeship a couple of months ago, and by his father's account has a good head on his shoulders. His stepmother, forty-nine, thinks the age gap is too big and says the relationship is inherently unhealthy because of it. 2
The poster does not defend the relationship outright. He says the gap is big and that it was weird at first. But he says he looked and kept looking and cannot find what his wife describes: Emma is not controlling, does not isolate Arthur from anyone, treats him as an equal, and they are happy. 2
The current complaint is the wardrobe. His wife has been commenting on how Emma dresses, and in his words says that Emma always dresses like she is going to a meeting. The poster notes that Emma looks well put together and not overdressed, and does well for herself. 2
He has not raised any of it with his wife directly. What he did was take his son aside and tell him that if things ever go south he has a place to stay. He ends by saying he is tired of this being an issue every time they visit. 2
Twenty thousand dollars
A thirty-year-old writes that she called off her wedding to her partner last year and stayed in the relationship another year. They had been together almost four. She brought him every reason she had called the wedding off, along with suggestions for working on them, and says nothing changed on his side and that only she ever started those conversations. Last week she ended it. 3
She told her parents and her sister in the family group chat; they live eight or nine hours away. The post is less about the breakup than about having nobody to take it to. She writes that she wishes she had a parent who cared what would make her happy, rather than a parent who cares about their own interests. 3
Her mother, in her account, answers problems with projects: mention a job and she suggests a government job again; mention a relationship and she hears a wedding, and behind the wedding, children. The post also sets out a genetic mutation that the poster and her sister share, which their parents know came from one of them and have declined to be tested for. The poster says she decided the ethical route to a child would be IVF and decided she did not want to go through it, and told her mother so in detail. Her mother paused and asked when she was going to have children. 3
Three days after the split, her mother texted. She and the poster's father wanted to give her twenty thousand dollars, to "fix" the genetic mutation and to pay for a baby, and asked her to call so they could discuss having a baby. The poster writes that her eye was twitching as she typed, because she is trying to work out where she will live and how she will move. 3
She also describes parents who once offered to fund a trade course and pulled out after she had started it, redirecting the money to her younger sister after a health crisis. She says they have always attached conditions to money, and that she has turned their offers down for years. 3
Where all three land
A girlfriend who would leave her boyfriend without hesitation for a man in a collar who does not exist. A stepmother with a file on a woman she has met a handful of times and never once described accurately. A grandmother who has already spent twenty thousand dollars on a baby, three days after her daughter's life came apart.
None of them is lying about anything big. Each of them is being entirely sincere about a person who is not there, and sincerity is very hard to argue with — which is exactly why the real person standing in front of them keeps losing.
Who in your life is in a relationship with an idea of you, and what would it cost to introduce them to the real one?
References
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