Stop Acting

Some scripts don’t need a rewrite.
They just need you to finally stop acting in them.

There’s a specific kind of shame that doesn’t yell at you.
It just sighs.

That quiet, disappointed voice ... “Dammit… when are you gonna learn?”
That wasn’t my parents. They never knew. Not until I was already too far in, usually one foot into a commitment, the other still stuck in the doorframe.
No…
That voice belonged to my friends.

They’d see it before I did. The emotional reruns. The too-familiar patterns.
“She’s sweet, man… but is she the one?”
“Are you even in this, or are you just afraid to be alone?”
Or the one that haunted me the most:
“You’re not trying to hurt her… but you kinda are.”

And they were right.
I wasn’t malicious. But I was selfish.
After a heartbreak in the 90s that left me gutted when she got engaged to someone else not long after I ended things ... I think something in me froze over.

I chased intimacy, not love.
Consistency, not connection.
Control… not commitment.

And I kept picking the same kind of partner.
Different names. Different cities. Different reasons. But the same script.

Familiarity is a hell of a drug. Especially when it wears the mask of cultural overlap.
I stuck to the Asian archetype ... not out of fetish, but fluency. I knew what jokes landed. I understood the rhythm. The rituals. I knew how to impress. I knew the dance.

But I wasn’t dancing with them.
I was dancing with ghosts.
Ghosts of old country values. Of what it meant to “be a man.” Of roles I thought I was supposed to play ... leader, protector, provider ... long after the story had changed.
And I kept leading the same kind of waltz…
Right into relationships I never really stepped into.

Some of those women fell hard.
And I knew it.
And I stayed, even after saying I wasn’t ready ... because it felt good to be wanted.
And for a while, that was enough. Until it wasn’t.
Until I saw myself clearly, finally… in their hurt eyes.
And I realized I wasn’t the nice guy.
I was the coward. The soft-spoken villain in someone else’s origin story.

Years later, I called a few of them. Took them to dinner. Looked them in the eye.
Not to fix anything ... I knew I couldn’t ... but to say the words I should’ve said when it mattered:
“I’m sorry.”

And what I was really apologizing for wasn’t just the way things ended.
I was apologizing for not being honest with myself…
For letting pain lead the way…
For confusing control with safety…
And for believing that attention was enough to fill the gap that love was supposed to live in.

Today? That part of me is still there.
Refined maybe. But present.

Living in Saudi now, I see how warped both ends of the relationship spectrum can get ... old values and new ideals, both misinterpreted in ways that pull the whole thing apart.

I still believe in the idea of commitment. Of roles. Of love built on real understanding.
But I’ve stopped trying to script it.

Because maybe love isn’t about picking the right font…
Maybe it’s about learning how to write a new story… in your own handwriting.