A lack of purpose leads to romantic obsession

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Yesterday I vented. I said things I wouldn’t say in daylight, cried myself out at some ugly hour, and woke up to find the world had rearranged itself back into something bearable. Nothing outside changed. I just slept. And now I’m a little embarrassed about the person who wrote all that at 10 pm, even though she was telling the truth as she felt it. Thank you for being kind to that version of me. I mean it. Love you for that. Now let me get back to the thing I actually wanted to think through today.

Someone said that a lack of purpose leads to romantic obsession. Well, at this point I don’t know. But the more I turn it over, the more I think there’s something real in it, and I want to work it out here in the open.

This is how I’ve come to understand it, from the inside.

I’ve noticed that my mind hates empty space. It’s like a house that refuses to sit dark. If there’s no lamp on, it’ll light a fire in the kitchen just to have something glowing. When I have something big I’m actually building toward, my attention flows outward into that thing, and there’s just less of me left over to fixate on a person. But when the purpose drains out, when my days go flat and there’s nothing I’m reaching for, all that leftover energy has to go somewhere. And it almost always goes toward a person, because a person is the most vivid, most rewarding thing a bored mind can find to point itself at.

I think of it like a river. A river with somewhere to go carves canyons, turns mills, waters fields. A river with nowhere to go just pools and floods the low ground. My feelings for someone become that flood. Not because the person is so extraordinary, but because I had all this water and no channel for it. The obsession is not really about them. It’s about the missing riverbed.

Let me give you the most relatable version I can think of. You know how a long, boring layover in an airport makes the tiniest thing feel enormous? Someone half-interesting sits near you and suddenly you’ve invented a whole future. The coffee tastes like the best coffee. You notice everything. That’s not because the airport is magical. It’s because you have nothing to do, so your attention, starved and restless, latches onto whatever’s nearby and inflates it to fill the time. A crush during an empty stretch of life is exactly that. The person is the interesting stranger at the gate, and my emptiness is the layover that makes them feel like destiny.

I’ve also seen this play out in people around me, which is how I know it isn’t just my private malfunction. I’ve watched someone lose a job or finish a huge project and, within weeks, become completely consumed by a new romance, texting constantly, checking constantly, spiraling. And I used to think, wow, they really found something special. Now I think: they lost their structure, and a person rushed in to fill the hole where the structure used to be. The intensity was grief for the purpose wearing a mask that looked like love.

There’s an old idea I keep coming back to. Someone once said that boredom is the root of a lot of human trouble, and I think obsession is just boredom that found a target. A restless mind will manufacture drama if you don’t give it a job. It will take a small, ordinary connection and blow it up into a saga, complete with hope, despair, imagined conversations, and readings of a single text message again and again. I’ve written whole novels in my head about people who barely knew my name. And every single time, looking back, it happened during a stretch when the rest of my life had gone quiet.

And the part that makes it feel worse than it is? When I’m obsessing, it doesn’t feel like emptiness. It feels like the opposite. It feels like I’ve finally found the most important thing in the world. That is the trick. The obsession disguises itself as meaning. It hands me a reason to wake up, a thing to think about, a story I’m the main character of. So it feels like purpose, which is exactly why it’s so easy to mistake one for the other. But real purpose fills me up and leaves me steady. This kind of fixation empties me out and leaves me shaky, refreshing my phone, my whole mood hostage to whether one specific person responded.

And I think that’s the tell, the way I can actually distinguish them now. Something that’s genuinely good for me tends to make me feel more like myself, more grounded, more spread out across my life. This kind of obsession shrinks me down to a single point, a single person, a single question, and I lose interest in everything else. Love, the real kind, expands the world. This narrows it to one anxious dot.

So when I ask myself whether the lack of purpose caused the obsession, I don’t think I need a study to answer it. I just have to notice the pattern in my own life, which is embarrassingly consistent: the emptier my days, the harder I fall, and the fall is never really about the person. It’s about me looking for something to hold and grabbing the nearest warm thing.

Which brings me back to yesterday. I think last night’s meltdown and today’s calm are actually part of the same story I’m describing. When I have nothing solid to stand on, everything, a bad mood, a lonely night, a person I can’t stop thinking about, floods in and feels like the end of the world. And then I sleep, or something gives my mind a job again, and the water recedes, and I can see the ground I was standing on the whole time.

So maybe the answer isn’t to fight the obsession head-on. I’ve never won that fight; you can’t argue a flood into behaving. Maybe the answer is just to dig the riverbed. To give the water somewhere to go. To build something I’m actually reaching for, so my attention has a canyon to carve instead of a person to drown in.

I don’t fully know yet. But I know that this morning everything looks good again, and that has to mean something about how much of the darkness was never permanent, just unlit. And I know that the version of me who’s building toward something rarely lies awake obsessing over a single face. That version is too busy, too full, too much himself.

So today, instead of finding someone to fill the space, I think I’ll try to fill it myself. That’s the plan, anyway. Ask me again at 10 pm and I might tell you something different. But right now, in the daylight, this feels true.