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“I Can’t Stay With One Person Forever; That’s Not Natural. What if There Is a Better One Out There?”

What is “true love” anyway?

Mark Chu
7 min readDec 14, 2021
Photo by niu niu on Unsplash

The other day I watched the Office (the American version), Holly tells Michael Scott: “You do this, you know.”

“Do what?” Michael asks.

“You romanticize things.”

“I don’t romanticize th…No.”

“Michael, you cried at that tagline for a movie you made up.”

I looked at it and knew it deep down: that’s my problem too.

Since I was a kid, one thing I loved to do was look at other people’s houses and imagine what their lives were like. I would have this strong desire to know who they were and what they were doing; in my mind, especially women, they were fine-looking and youthful. Probably kind and smiled a lot too. I remember I was like 14. One night I looked at an apartment across the river, and I saw a shadow of a woman walking upstairs. It was way too small and blurry to see any detail, but I was so moved and amazed that I believed she must be an angel, and I was so eager to know her I was contemplating a plan to go there and find her.

This must be at least part of the reason why I love astronomy: I was fascinated by the world many, many lightyears away.

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Mark Chu
Mark Chu

Written by Mark Chu

I’m a professor of psychology at a small university in southern New Mexico. I like playing musical instruments, basketball, and writing stories.

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