We lived on opposite sides of town. Me, west of the main square, chopping trees or mining coal late into the night. He had a cabin on the beach. In fall, he decorated his front door with large, paper mushrooms. When we first met, he often wouldn’t leave his cabin until 11:30am; on other days, not at all. Most days, I visited the square, delivering ore to Clint, blacksmith and resident incel, or buying seeds from Pierre, the normie-dad grocer, but I only saw Elliott there once. He was walking along the river; I followed him home, caught up to him, introduced myself. His hair was thick, russet brown, maybe redder. It flowed around his shoulders, but hardly moved when he walked.
“Ah, the new farmer we’ve all been expecting… and whose arrival has sparked many a conversation! I’m Elliott… I live in the little cabin by the beach. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
He kept walking. At 11:30 the next morning, I waited outside his cabin with tulips.
Elliot is one of twelve villagers (six men, six women) you can marry in Stardew Valley, the open-world farming RPG and three-year Steam darling. Regardless of how you customize your avatar, the game begins the same: you’re working at a shitty office job when you decide to leave your unfulfilling city life behind to take over your grandfather’s farm. One of your first tasks in the game is to meet every person in the town. I have to admit, after I met Elliott, I never considered pursuing anyone else. One dev update describes Elliott as “a writer who dreams of one day writing a magnificent novel. He is a sentimental ‘romantic’ with a tendency to go off on flowery, poetic tangents... Could a humble farmer such as yourself be the inspiration Elliott is looking for?”
As I continued to romance Elliot with gifts I found around my farm— pomegranates, poppies, fire quartz, duck feathers— he let me into his life. First, he let me into his cabin. Sparse, of course, with little furniture: just a desk, a piano, and a bed.
“This is my writing desk,” he told me. “It’s where I spend most of my time. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. Have I told you that? That’s why I live out here by myself. I figured a lonely life by the sea would help me focus on my literary aspirations.”
My avatar realized his escape fantasy of becoming a farmer, but my escape fantasy has always been closer to Elliott’s, first dreamt up in college, when I was reading a lot of Spinoza: live completely alone, write constantly, and rely on brief, charged interactions with other people to whom I had no regular relationship or loyalty. I guess, too, I was a beautiful man in this fantasy, though that detail came later, or perhaps was implied. After a few more gifts, I’m awarded some more time alone with Elliott. I enter his cabin, but he doesn’t hear me, because he’s playing the piano.
When he sees me, he explains he’s taking a break from writing his book. “An occasional tune is the only recreation I allow myself.”
If I really had sequestered myself the way Elliott does, I’d definitely say things as obnoxious as “an occasional tune is the only recreation I allow myself,” and the first sentence of my book might also include the phrase “radiating with enigmatic omniscience.” My worst writing has come when I am poorest in relationships. In high school, I thought I had to be in love to write well; in college, I had to be single. Now I find the nature of the relationships irrelevant, as long as I’m part of a community. Besides, my writing is stimulated by regular contact with living minds, emotions, people. The beach is lovely, but I could never do with it what, for instance, Mary Oliver did. It seems like Elliott can’t, either.
I shouldn’t speak ill of my husband. It was thrilling at first, a man wanting me, the unfettered access to him, but I’m getting a little bored. We’ve been together for almost three years now. He makes me coffee most mornings. He did finish his book, right before our wedding. He’s gentle and kind when we talk, though he has been pestering me recently about adopting a child. Still, I have to admit, it’s getting harder and harder to look at him, to know he’ll be there each day for the rest of the game. In so many ways he’s the dream: a young, hot dude writer with pretty brown hair and a book under his belt. So why aren’t I happy?
Before we mutually ghosted each other, I was talking online a lot to a real live young hot dude farmer. In one of our conversations, I was surprised to learn he too played Stardew Valley. “It’s how I destress from work,” he said, “with more farming. But less consequential, more wholesome.” I told him I felt I’d made a mistake in marrying Elliott; he told me he’d married Abigail, an alt-ish resident with purple hair, and daughter of Pierre, the normie grocer. She likes video games and plays the flute.
“She also hangs out alone in graveyards,” the real farmer told me. Later, I’d confess my feelings to this man, only for him to let me know he wasn’t interested, and had started dating a new woman anyway. I found her on Instagram weeks later: She looks weirdly similar to Abigail, and her name starts with the letter A.
I mostly talked to the farmer online, but we had met first in person, at his farm, and then a few other times in Seattle. Once, he slept on my living room floor, another time on my couch. He was the first man I’d ever sincerely liked, romantically, and I fantasized about it often: me, writing until sunset in the old blue farmhouse, him working until I wandered across the wet grass to meet him at the barn, see the cows, say hi to the dog. I knew it couldn’t actually happen— He’s straight, or at least closeted, and such an intense partnership would a big jump from the kinds of secondary relationships my marriage has so far accommodated— but it was my fantasy. I could check into it whenever I was bored, or lonely, or horny, or (more often) all three at once. But my Stardew Valley game is more fixed than the farm of my mind. In Stardew Valley, I married Elliott, my most grandiose, selfish writer fantasy. I thought it’d be fun, but every time I open the game, I’m reminded of what I didn’t choose, and why I didn’t choose it. Worse than wishing I’d chosen a hermit’s life is seeing its emptiness so clearly, the reasons it wouldn’t work more and more glaringly obvious. I wouldn’t be smarter, more romantic, sexier, a better writer, a better reader. There’s no shortcut to the person I want to be. Only work, incremental change, editing, dishes, traffic.
When I confessed my feelings to Elliott, he said to me, “For once, I’m at a loss for words.” There’s no one way to win in Stardew Valley, but for the first time, my choice felt like a mistake.