27^th June, 2026 • Søren Aas

Safe Love

When refusing to be wrong holds us back

There was a night not long ago when I lay in bed building a pleasant scene. There was a woman in it I had been getting to know — warm, particular, someone I really liked. In the scene I was gently kissing her neck while she cooked, and later she sang me to sleep. It was tender and homely and very nice, and I let it run the way you let a film run, half-watching, drifting toward the edge of sleep.

Just before sleep took me, the woman in the scene was no longer her. The last face I held, the one I went under on, belonged to a stranger — a woman I pass on the street most afternoons, whom I have never spoken to and do not know. The casting had changed somewhere in the dark, quietly, without my willing it, and the strange part was that it hadn’t disturbed the scene at all. The feeling carried on uninterrupted. It had simply swapped one body for another and kept playing.

I have been turning that over since, because it turned out to be a question surfacing that I have not been able to settle. And it only gets worse the longer I look at it.

The obvious reading is that the scene was never about the women. What I was doing was generating a feeling — warmth, the soft sense of being loved — and a feeling, it seems, does not much care who is standing in the frame. It can be recast. To the part of me running the projector, the woman I liked and the stranger I didn’t know were the same: two faces available for one role. I have written elsewhere about a coping mechanism of watching myself from a half-step above my own life, a way of reading the weather that a child works out early in a house where the weather matters. This looked like the same faculty, turned toward love.

It would be easy to stop there — to call the scene a counterfeit and the woman the real thing it was counterfeiting. But that assumes the one thing I cannot establish: that my wanting of her is real to begin with. And when I go looking for that, I can’t find the bottom of it.

The warmth is real enough, I think. But it grew up entirely on a screen as the small daily multimedia people send each other now. I have never met her. What I have instead is a sense of her as very nearly a perfect match, and the red flag is perfect. Perfect is a property of things that do not exist, and what I assembled over pixels on a screen was free to stay perfect precisely because she was never present to spoil it. The warmth may be hers. The perfection is mine, and the program’s. The program is the ordinary one, the one everybody is handed — find someone, build a life, be happy — and I have run it so long, and so dutifully, that I can no longer tell my own wanting from its instructions.

For a while I thought the other want escaped all this. The woman on the street, the one I pass and have never spoken to — her I simply fancy. When I see her I want her, plainly, and there is no shame in that; a body answering a body is not a problem to be solved. I reached for that want like a handhold. It seemed to come from somewhere the program couldn’t reach: from the body, which never learned to please anyone, which wants what it wants. Here, at last, was one thing I could vouch for.

Except that fancying her already includes wanting to walk up to her, and the instant I notice that, a scene is running — and it is not the tender one. It is a film in a coarser genre, one I would not narrate at dinner, and it has cast her in it before I have heard her voice. What I have been calling chemistry is my body’s yes plus a second person I invented to return it, and the invented return is already the first frame. The street want is not the exception to the scripting. It is only a script in a rougher key, and it boots faster, before I can get under it to whatever clean signal I was sure was down there.

So both women are people I have never met. One assembled out of texts and the soft delay of a screen, the other out of a glance and an answer I wrote for her. I have put each of them in a film. I thought the problem was choosing between the two, turns out I had the problem wrong.

Because the films are not desires. I had been holding them up against each other to find out which was real and which the imposter, and that was never what they were for. They are forecasts. The point of running one was never to feel something; it was to see the ending. I send the scene ahead to the part where I can tell how it comes out, and if the ending looks survivable I let that become the reason to move — without quite noticing that I am the one who shot the ending, that the future I am taking my orders from is a future I staged. I am the audience the last scene moves, and the director who arranged it to move me, and I had never once caught myself being both. I cannot get under this by looking harder, either, because the looking is the forecast.

The thing I had been calling indecision stopped looking like indecision. If these were desires, one of them would pull harder, and I would go towards it. What I am doing instead is checking that I will not be wrong. This is a different operation and one no ending I can imagine can guarantee. A forecast is not a result. So I run another forecast with different variables, and another, and I never leave my seat. And the one behaviour that perfectly satisfies do not get it wrong is to commit to none. The paralysis I had been treating as a failure is the machine working exactly as built. Its task was never to arrive anywhere. It was to keep me from being caught out.

Which is the cut, and I think the real one. A choice only counts where the ending is unknown. The margin for error is where life exists. So the refusal to be wrong and the self deception to believe I can create my future turn out to be the same thing, performed so long I didn’t remember it was one act. Every ending I screen in advance, to be safe, is a small vote against being anywhere at all.

Perhaps I should stop running the forecast and consent to getting it wrong sometimes. Not uncertainty in the abstract, which is easy to be noble about, but the narrow, specific thing: to walk into the one room where the error would cost me, without first screening how it ends. The moment I write that, though, I can feel the machine reaching for it. The man who finally gave up needing to be right is just another blockbuster from the same studio. Better even than the man who sees clearly — and it would have the thing cut and scored by morning. So I won’t tell you I let go. Because by now I narrate my own productions so well that describing the door becomes another way of not walking through it.

Another clue is that the forecasting fires in proportion to the perceived cost of being wrong. Most daily things don’t trip it, like taking the long way home, or whether to make the coffee strong. These things don’t warrant an ending screened in advance. But the things I consider unsafe, like love, where there are real stakes. That’s when the apparatus comes online.

So perhaps the move, in that case, is the one the small choices already know how to make: to go in without watching the ending first. Except I can’t because the movie is already screening. So maybe it’s knowing the risks and still doing it?

I would like to report that I have done this, and I haven’t; I have written a careful description of the door I have yet to pass through.

That is the landscape. There is no clearing in it. There is weather, and things that need doing, and someone still watching the endings before they arrive. I don’t know where to go from here.

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