Six relationships outlining and defining a lifetime, evenly divided between the unequal expectations of mine and theirs.  Miss-matched, miss-meshed, messed up, my own misgivings. 

While pretending in a choreographed life, I was really just fooling myself; placating either the nagging reality of maintaining a forced-fit or the eventuality of the inevitable and uncomfortably sad exit.

My hope, every time, was for both of us to be happy and content at the same moment with the same intensity and for the same reasons: equal love for each other, but we never got it just right.  It was at its grandest a beautiful illusion before it became the reality-checking delusion ending in a heart-hardening thud.