I spent a lot of my time when I was a kid being in love with characters from books… and tv shows… and cartoons. I mean I had actual crushes on these fictional guys. Half the time when I was in my room reading (and I read a lot as a kid) I’d be staring blankly at the pages while I imagined the conversations that I’d have if I ever ran into oh, say, Aragorn, son of Arathorn, or Mr. Spock. Yeah. Spock was hot. And I was a total dork.

I was just about to say that I can’t remember the first fictional guy that I fell in love with, but then it hit me. It was Sherlock Holmes, and I was probably 11 or 12 years old. My dad bought me a faux-leather bound edition of the complete set of Holmes stories. I read it through from start to finish, and somewhere in there I fell deeply, irreversibly in love with the taciturn, tall, hyper-intelligent cocaine addict. The bug for imaginary romance had bit me. Hard. And of course I fell for a complicated man, because I wanted to imagine my own stories. And what’s the fun of a story that starts with “and they lived happily ever after”? There has to be adversity, right? Adversity that is, of course, overcome successfully by love. Because it always works out. Right?

Give me a break. I was young.

And yes, I fell for the oldest trick in the… Well, you know. The myth of the guy with the tortured past. The guy that will always be unhappy. Until he meets you. And your love? Will transform him.

Someday someone will have to explain to me how so many little girls manage to pick up the same collective delusion. How does this virus manage to propagate itself so efficiently? Why do so many of us fall for it?

So I loved Sherlock Holmes. I loved Mr. Spock for much the same reasons. In the case of Aragorn, I think I was just disappointed that the girl Tolkein doomed him to marry sucked so much. I mean, here he was, the coolest character in the book. Handsome, wily, had the stealth skills of a ninja, knew the way of the woods, could kick major ass, was the disguised heir to a kingdom… and he ends up with… the most boring woman in all of Middle Earth. Arwen never did a single interesting thing in over a thousand pages of text. She sat at home while the Fellowship was having all the fun and then showed up at the end to marry the hero with whom she had nothing in common. In my version, Aragorn had a bad-ass female companion who journeyed with the Fellowship and saved them all from time to time. She and Aragorn would lay awake in the forests of Middle Earth at night and talk. Mostly about how his destined bride sucked and how much he hated her. Sometimes my story would end with Arwen going off to hang out with the rest of the elves, leaving me and Aragorn to live happily ever after. But mostly (because I hated to mess too much with the real story), I’d offer Aragorn a choice and he reluctantly picked Arwen because she was his destiny and all, but then he spent years and years and years regretting his choice and wishing he’d picked me, because I was so much cooler. So he didn’t pick me, but at least I knew that made him miserable.

At times I wasn’t a particularly nice kid.

My urge to construct my fictional romances within the confines of the story occasionally led to some stories that even at the time I thought were stupid. Take my imaginary boyfriend Luke Skywalker, for example. Yes. Luke. Who, even at age 9, I knew was a big wuss compared to the dashing, debonaire Harrison Ford. Uh, I mean Han Solo. But Han was already in love with Leia, see? And they were a couple that I actually believed in, unlike Aragorn and Arwen. So my choices were:

1. Pretend I was Leia. But then I couldn’t make up stuff as freely. I’d be stuck with what her character had done in the movies, and I didn’t have any interest in redoing storylines that I had already seen. (Also perhaps a sign that I would never be a good actor. It was just too hard to subsume my personality into that of another character.)


2. Be a no-good relationship-wrecking beeyotch. See above. I liked Han and Leia together. I didn’t want to imagine some story that would break them up just so I could get myself a little carbonite kissing action.


3. (And this is the one I finally chose.) Deny the fact that I really liked Han Solo better and settle for Luke Skywalker.

Yeah, I told you it was stupid.

I can only thank my lucky stars that I was born too early for Internet fan fiction. Mercifully, I was able to live out my adolescent delusions without exposing them to public scrutiny. Um, until now, I guess.

So imaginary boyfriends are something you outgrow, right? I wish I could say it was that simple. I still find myself from time to time in love with men who, while they themselves may be real, exist just as much in my head as my old paper and ink crushes. There’s nothing more seductive than the allure of the imaginary man. I’ve been in “love” with men I’ve seen on the subway. Men I’ve seen in profile at the next table over in the coffeeshop. And the most dangerous kind of all. Men I know well enough to imagine I understand them.

After all this time, I finally understand the one thing they have in common, all these imaginary boyfriends. No matter how much you try to picture them as a complete whole, you can’t get away from the fact that, when only one person is involved in their creation, they stay flat and two-dimensional.