I Fell in Love with a Fictional Character I Invented

And six months later, I met him in real life

I was at a point of no return, or so I thought. My personal life was tied up in knots in more ways than I can even describe and my professional life felt like it had taken on a dangerous sort of momentum, like a reckless driver in a fast car without seatbelts. My response was to close my eyes and look neither left nor right. I figured I would see it through to whatever catastrophic end it might take.

I had a book to work on and I poured myself into it; I had just published one and wanted to write this next one quickly, on the heels of the first, so that readers and above all publishers wouldn’t forget who I was.

A friend of a friend was allowing me to stay in his weekend house, an hour and a half outside of Berlin, where I lived at the time. It was situated not in a village but in a cluster of just four houses, two of which seemed to be unoccupied. The remaining house sometimes emitted screechy, metal-grating sounds that I assumed were meant to be music; apart from that, it was quieter than any other place I had been in for a long time. I thought it would be an ideal place to hunker down and focus on writing. My boyfriend dropped me off with bags full of groceries for my two-week stay; I had no car of my own and the nearest supermarket was several kilometers away.

photos taken with a pretty early iPhone

The first book had been a joy to write, an act more of receiving than of creating. The second book required a lot of research and was the first novel I was attempting to write. I felt just as lost in it as I did in the swamp of my real life.

I went for long walks down the dirt roads of the countryside, looking out over gently swaying fields of wheat. There was so much sky outside the city, blue and streaked with cotton-swab clouds during the day, sparkling black at night—contrasts I never experienced in my urban everyday. I rode my bicycle to a nearby reed-encircled swimming lake, where I was sometimes alone with the crickets and the ducks. Inside the house, I stared at the computer screen. I fed the stray cats who came to the window. I removed copious numbers of spiders from near the bed and tried hard not to think of them as I was falling asleep.

My book was an attempt at fictionalizing my grandmother’s life, weaving in what I had read about Singapore during the Second World War. I had never written anything historical before, nor anything that required any real research, and I had no idea how to do it. Page after page read as if I were dumping disorganized facts into a narrative that could not accommodate them. I grew more and more frustrated and less and less convinced that I was capable of writing this book, indeed of writing any book ever again.

Permission to Write Something No One Will Read

After five days of wrestling with this awkward history-textbook-cum-novel, I decided to give myself a break. If I can’t write this, I thought, I’ll write something else. Anything that comes to mind. I recalled the advice of my creative writing teacher from college: if you can’t write, lower your standards. I started writing about a young woman who lived in New York and worked for an event manager who was both a father figure and a lover to her. She felt stuck; she knew she wanted to leave the relationship and the job and do something else, but she couldn’t find the courage to move on.

It was easy to write, since I had given myself permission to make up a story no one would ever read. I filled it with details of the Manhattan I had known in the 1990s and sometimes still missed. I let the story take embarrassingly clichéd turns because it didn’t matter, this was for no one’s eyes but my own.

I had my alter ego meet a boy her age, a freewheeling hippie type unfettered by societal conventions. I made him attractive, unpredictable, funny, spontaneous, and somewhat telepathic. He knew what she was feeling; he could always spot the discrepancy between her thoughts and her words. He knew she would be afraid to open her heart to him because he didn’t fit into her idea of a suitable partner, so he gave her space while making his feelings known.

I felt guilty for abandoning the ‘real’ book, but I was stuck. Surely it was better to write a trashy romance vignette than nothing at all. I continued to spin the story of these two characters, continued to disappear into my invented world as a diversion from the mess of my physical world and my inability to work on the book. I capitulated to it and made no more pretense of working on the novel for the remaining ten days I spent at my homemade writing retreat. Later, I would marvel at the force of that internal takeover and the way it altered the course of my life.

When the real boyfriend I was living with came to pick me up and bring me back to Berlin, I felt shortchanged. I found myself comparing him to my fictional boy. Unlike the make-believe boyfriend, the real one kept his thoughts mostly to himself and seemed uninterested in mine. He corrected my German grammar. He hugged me as if I were a delicate piece of pottery. The silence between us was not the comfort of a well-worn relationship; it was heavy with everything we were not telling each other.

I had always blamed our frequent misunderstandings on the language barrier, but now I began to wonder whether love itself—that word surely being the most translatable of all—had deserted us.

I had not accomplished my retreat goals, but strangely, I felt contented. I had no intention of doing anything with the love story I had initiated, but it kept writing itself forward in my mind. I missed my protagonists. I missed the feeling the boy had given the girl, their conversations, their small, manageable drama.

I began to question whether I had completely lost my mind by falling in love with a fictional character of my own invention.

Still, I felt oddly buoyed by my phantom infatuation. I went on with the life that now more than ever felt hijacked by an unseen force. It kept me very busy, and at the very least, that prevented me from taking any action I might later regret.

About half a year into this strange state of affairs, I had a minor operation to correct the hallux valgus on my right foot. It seemed like good timing, as I was in between orchestra contracts and didn’t have to travel much. My surgeon, who was also my upstairs neighbor, sent me across the street to a physiotherapy practice I had walked past thousands of times but never entered. Go to the young man named David, he said; he is very good at lymphatic drainage. How convenient, I thought.

A few days later, I was sitting in the waiting room of the practice, looking at my foot in its big blue shoe when he came to call my name. I looked up and smiled in confusion; did I know him from somewhere? He looked so familiar. Had I seen him on the street before? As I crutched my way down the hallway after him, it hit me: this was the boy I had invented.

Fifteen years later, we are still together—married, in fact, something that was never on my radar.

Did I manifest this partner that I had been longing for so secretly I hadn’t even admitted it to myself? Did his presence show up in my psyche and knock on the door, asking to be let in? Was it a little bit of both?

What I do know is this: I thought I was slacking off. I felt guilty for neglecting the work I had gone there to do. Had I pushed through with my characteristic discipline and kept my nose to the grindstone of my failing novel, I might never have written that story. Without that story and the hold its characters had over me, I would never have recognized the real-life partner who was waiting to join me. Like my protagonist, he didn’t fit into any shape I expected my partner to have: he was not a musician, an artist, or an academic. We had and still have completely different interests, styles, and ideas about many things. But the essence of his personality—his free spirit, his ability to access my thoughts and feelings before I could, his sense of humor—that was unmistakable. I had fallen in love with his alter ego six months before meeting the real person.

Why has this become so significant now?

I used to believe that my achievements and the good things that came to me were the logical result of hard work, determination, a responsible attitude. Some of my achievements definitely did follow that pattern, but without exception, I later realized that they had landed me in situations that did not suit me at best and harmed me at worst. I was following societal scripts to accomplish acceptable goals.

Writing that story in all its embarrassing, sappy, clichéd detail opened a rare portal for me to explore what I really wanted when no one was looking. I had arrived at a phase of my life where I weighed everything according to its marketplace value, even my intimate relationships. Everything had to serve a certain narrative, and I was no longer sure who had authored it. It was uncharacteristic of me to indulge in anything that would not predictably result in some sort of career advantage. I had capitalized on all my creative pursuits; there was no room left for fantasy, desire, or pointless daydreaming.

My theory is this: the wilderness of fantasy had reclaimed me from my city pragmatism while I was out there among the wheat fields.

I believe our greatest and most irreplaceable human asset is fantasy.

As I learned in my unintentional experiment, fantasy is a key that opens a portal. It provides escape, yes, but it also allows us to dwell in a state of grace for a few moments at a time. It interrupts the negative spiraling that comes from certainty about a fixed outcome. Fantasy allows us to inhabit a world adjacent to reality yet close enough to touch.

It carries no guarantees, and the risk of not wanting to return is real. The alternative at the other end of the imagination spectrum, however, is to tolerate zero deviation from the status quo. To say: this is the way it is, and this is the way it must remain.

I refuse to be swallowed by that hell any longer.

Someone once dreamt of every human invention we know, from the wheel to artificial intelligence.

There’s no perfect world, just as there is no perfect relationship. But we do not have to succumb to auto-pilot. We always have the power to open the portal to the world we choose, not the one we inherited.

So—let’s dream a little dream, shall we?