799: The Lives of Others

A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZChicago, it's This American Life. I'm Lily Sullivan sitting in for Ira Glass.

A while back, we got an email from a listener in a small town in Utah. He wrote, it seems like half the town has a huge elementary school-style crush on a local veterinarian. And I wanted to know, could this be real? So I flew to Utah, and I went to the place people would know a local vet, the dog park.

Hey, do you guys have a question? I'm going to write a video story about a vet who works here in town in Doctor Arts. Yeah, like Arts the Hearts, the Rob. I thought it'd take me a long time to assess this.

It didn't. I think different women in town thought he was very attractive. That's what I heard. Very attractive, yes.

Everybody talks about the cute vet in town. Everybody says that about him. I mean, I'm not into Doctor Arts, but I say he's looking pretty good. No, he's hot.

But he's totally upstanding. He would never. But yeah, he's hot, for sure. Did you just say sorry to your husband?

Yeah. Access me. He was first at her. Mostly his people.

He wasn't even their vet. Though I did talk to someone who knows him as her vet. I tell you your name, but she asked that she and her dogs remained anonymous. Everybody knows Doctor Arts is hot.

I refer to him as my dreamy. He's just so cute. Her husband, Jim, was fine with me using his name. Because Doctor Arts doesn't know who he is, because his wife always volunteers to take their dogs to the vet herself, alone.

So where I really realized, I think that's the moment I realized that it was a serious crush. I guess we were dating. We had been dating long enough that we were already living in a house together. She was at this work training.

She called me and I was at home and she said, I need you to log into my computer because I need you to send over a file that I need for this training. You okay with me telling you the story? His wife nods and squeezes her eyes shut. She puts her face in her hands.

I was like, okay, cool. I asked her. I got onto her computer and I think I had to log into her email. I was like, so what's your email password?

She goes, oh shit. What's the deal? She goes quiet for a moment. The password is doctor arts for life.

Like a teenage girl, doctor arts number four, L-Y-F-E. Was not L-Y-F-E. I spelled that part correctly. That's why I remember it.

And yeah, I just remember it. I was like, okay, yeah, wow, this is a real crush. This is a game I was there before I was. That's so embarrassing.

What's embarrassing about it is the amount of time they spend on this. This woman is on group threads with five other people, men and women, all couples, all straight and happy relationships. One thread they told me is 80% dedicated to either Christmas movies or doctor arts. They don't know why they do it.

The one sidedness, the degree of it all. It confuses even them. Like, it's not like a romantic crush, you know? I don't have a romantic crush on Arvet.

This is someone else on the thread, Alyssa. But there is something like very vulnerable, I think, about admitting that you think about someone more than they would think about you. Nonetheless, at this point, the idea of doctor arts has become so omnipresent, they built this whole imagined life for him. Here's Jim again, the guy I found his wife's password.

He's never actually met or talked to doctor arts. I picture that he lives on a ranch somewhere and has a couple of horses. Does he? Didn't you tell me once about where he lives?

No? No? Okay. I guess I made that all of my head.

Same more. Like what else? Like fill it out because if you're picturing it, they're showing more there, right? Yeah.

No, he's got a wife and kids and he lives on a ranch and he's got horses. He's like, you know, he's wearing jeans and a final shirt, living on a ranch. That's honestly, that's always what I just put that together in my head entirely. Your imagine version of him lives?

Yes. Yes. The wife part, I'm pretty sure he does have a wife, right? He is married.

Yes. How do you know that? Pretty sure he has a ring on his finger. You've looked.

Yes, I always look. You always look. Max McCleary, the guy who first wrote us about all this, had his own image. It's this like, it's like him tending to like a stove top percolator and like, you know, a- Is this so specific?

Yeah, right? My mind just immediately went to this and then like, you know, walking out to like watch the sunrise on his porch in like a flannel jacket kind of thing. And that's probably super off base. He probably like has a curig.

I have no idea. But yeah, I've got this like, just this image of him in like a cabin, basically. It would be out of character for him to, you know, not watch the sunrise with a cup of coffee that probably has some coffee grounds in it, you know? Like he rides a motorcycle, which, you know, again, is he going to like throw his bag on his motorcycle and ride through the countryside or the wind in his hair to go like, save a horse or something.

And this is what I'm here to talk about today. I totally understand this thing you're doing, putting so much thought into someone who's basically a stranger. Something I do too. That I think lots of us do, but never really name.

I've never been the most social person on earth. My natural state seems to be to spend a lot of time alone. But it wasn't until COVID and the prolonged isolation that I started noticing that sometimes random people would walk through my mind, people I had no reason to be thinking about. And my mind would just perch there, watching them for like a little while.

Nothing loaded. It wasn't a crushy feeling. It's really neutral actually. I just kind of hover in that scene for a moment.

For me, it's usually this person who I really don't know very well. I know we're in college. She doesn't live near me, but sometimes, barely often, I'll picture her, just washing dishes in her house. Sunlight pouring onto the sink, but I picture as white even though I can't remember if that's right.

There's warm running water, suds, a few water glasses. The images are like a little coffee break for my own life, where I try on hers for size. Feels nice there, peaceful, and rooted. But don't feelings I feel a ton of in my own life.

She does not know that I do this, and I never want her to find out. Today on our show, we lean into this thing that is so awkward that we usually turn away from it. We're calling it the lives of others. I don't know why I do this, but I think it's something so common, so let's talk about it.

First stop, Dr. Arts. Does he have any idea how much he's taken over people's brains? Stay with us.

Act one. So, I hear your heart. I drove out to Dr. Arts's house on a sunny winter day on what I have to say is probably the most cringy assignment I've ever had.

And when my GPS told me to turn left off the highway, I got my first unexpected sign. A literal sign as I entered the driveway. Lost river ranch at red. Carded and metal mounted between two columns of piled boulders.

A ranch, just like Jim had imagined. I drove down the mountain, passed the deep Wrangler, an electric blue pickup, passed the motorcycles. And then I saw it, crusting it off the hill. A beautiful log cabin.

And I met Dr. Arts. Or as he calls himself, John. Hi!

You know you already got that thing rolling. Yeah, I think you're going to be standing. You're the best. You're the best.

You're the best. Let's just get this out of the way. There's Paul Newman going on. Song, pepper, hair, hazel eyes that one could accurately characterize as soul piercing.

But what you notice most is the way you're hit with a force field of magnetic kindness. And can I just say, there's no normal way to go up to someone and say professionally. Were you aware that everyone has a crush on you? I stumbled through it.

I'm curious. I guess like, so I'm doing my best, okay? The thing that I said about emails everyone really likes you, says you're amazing with people. And the thing that I haven't said yet is that there's a bit of a there's a townwide crush that people talk about with you.

But yeah, Dr. Arts didn't blink an eye. Wasn't used to him. Well, I think I knew somewhat.

And again, it wasn't a constant part of my life. But you know, for instance, where my now wife used to work when we started dating, you know, I'd go in to see my wife and have a beer. His wife worked at a brew pub in town. And the manager would come up and like kind of sit next to me and put her arm around me jokingly, like, you know, our book club last night turned into a conversation about you.

You know, so I would get that occasionally. Or whatever. And I would leave little notes with his receptionist, things like that. And I mean, most of it's just flattering and harmless and innocent, you know, for sure.

But I was, you know, appreciative and flattered. Yeah, certainly. But that was, you know, a few people would tell me things like that. So, and I never extrapolated it to being like the whole town was talking about me or anything.

I didn't let my imagination run wild to by any means. Oh, no, no. Of course not. He would ever do something like that.

I told him more about how people imagined him. And the answer I got was like, this is going to sound crazy, but the picture I have is like tending to like a stove top coffee percolator and taking it out to the porch to like watch the sunrise in like a flannel. Behind me? You just described me actually.

And I love percolators. That's funny. Are you serious? Oh my God, it's my favorite.

I had my grandmother's four cup percolator all through Vetsuit. And so my wife and I just bought and we bought a coffee pot. You know, we needed to get new stuff and I bought a 12 cup percolator and I just can't master it the way I had that fork up. So all those things I thought, ranch check, cabin check, coffee percolator check, flannel check, motorcycle.

I'm going to say double check because it goes on long rides alone in the desert. Okay, no horses. But he has worked as a Wrangler in Montana and watching the sunrise from his porch. Well, his porch faces west, not east.

And so not sunrise, they're close, but sunset is my big thing. And I have a sunset tune released by Pearl Jam. Sunset here are incredible. Right over the ridge right there.

Oh my God, yeah, you're pointing absolutely incredible. And again, I don't know quite how to say this professionally, but this entire gazing up on the snow kissed ridge thing, as a reporter, I can report that as an objectively hot scenario. Yeah, I mean like I laughed when they said that because I was like, that's not how anyone lives. But like as I'm looking out, you're pointing at snow covered mountains and this is a log cabin in a porch.

Yeah, yeah. And there's the reservoirs right there. It is absolutely amazing, absolutely amazing. I was honestly floored that they got it so close.

To me, that had seemed like the least likely possible outcome of all of this. Though to everyone in town, he was a fantasy person. So they invented a life that was perfect enough for this perfect person, which of course left so much out. For instance, Dr.

Arts is funny and he likes dorky things, like waiting for guffin and Monty Python, which you quote, springly and regularly. And we'll call him, can't you see? Also, no one in town knew the most important thing in his life right now, which is that he's leaving. When I talked to him, he already had his house almost entirely packed up.

He hadn't told many clients yet, but his wife and three dogs were already gone. He's moving back to Pittsburgh, his hometown, his mom's getting older and even like her being alone so much. In fact, they just had a scare and he was about to get on a red eye. Luckily, I thought it was going straight to the hospital, but my mom, my wife's with her right now, they discharged her.

So I'll probably just go over and say hi mom and fall asleep on her chair, you know, in her chair or something. Are you guys close? Oh, very. Yes.

I want to move home as much as possible as soon as possible because my mother, she's 88. So you know, you got to take every day. I want to be there every day. I possibly can.

Before I left, I asked him the question so many people in town had asked me. Does Dr. Arts have a Dr. Arts?

Like does he do this too? And he was very polite and tried so hard to say yes. Really tried to put me at ease and say that I wasn't a weirdo that no one in town was a creep. That is totally human and that of course he does this.

But the only example he could come up with was this. Yeah, I remember just me and my buddy talking to me. I got fixated on some guys belt. I think it was wearing a belt and a hot tub.

And so. He was wearing a belt and hot tub? Yeah, like shorts. He didn't maybe in a bathing suit.

So he had a belt on with his shorts. And I mean, we literally was a half hour talking about when he bought that belt and what that belt meant to him. And then, you know, then the story went way beyond that belt. That was a good effort.

But I think it's not the same thing. When he's drinking his coffee and staring at the amazing sunset from his cabin, I do not think he's thinking about that guy in a hot tub. Maybe that's the difference between Dr. Arts and the rest of us.

Some of us spend a lot of time thinking about people we don't know. And some of us are the thought about. Back to who is Sarah Blessed? So maybe some of us spend a weird amount of energy thinking about people we barely know.

But rarely then do we go up to those same people and get to know them and test the reality of whatever fantasy we have of them. But in our next story, that's exactly what happens. It comes from producer Elise Spiegel. This is a little weird, but it's going to be okay.

Um, yeah. It's never easy for me to interview people I'm close to. So usually I try hard to avoid it. But a little while ago, I sat down with one of my dearest friends, Sarah Blessed, to talk about something that happened to her when we were younger.

A story that I've recently come to see in a totally new way. As not just a story about a strange thing that happened, but also as a good example of the way stories, the ones we tell about ourselves and others we imagine, can bend our lives in odd directions. I was thinking about how this is such a crazy story, but I never ever thought of it as a story because I just experienced it as like, our lives. I met Sarah my first year of college.

We ate at the same place at Oberlin, a small house on campus called Keat. I was immediately drunk to Sarah, I think because I saw her as my opposite. To me, Sarah seemed like a red-headed gush of uncomplicated joy, music, and glitter, a free and easy person who was up for anything. I saw myself as the mirror opposite.

There's nothing free or easy about me. I was hell-bent, so on a mission to remake myself that I was oblivious to many of the parts of college life that preoccupied my peers, including as Sarah was maybe a little quicker point out. Hiding. You wore the same thing every day.

You wore this kind of brownish sweatshirt that had a lot of holes in it, and you always had a backpack that was full of books because you were always in the library. And apparently I was the one who was not square. I was kind of hippy, whatever happens happens, you know, I'll go with the flow. And the least was like, what the hell are you doing?

I could not go with the flow, not even a little because of violin. The short version is that for a variety of reasons, my mother decided when I was five that I would become a world-famous solo violinist. But inconveniently for me, world-famous solo violinist is a field which involves ridiculous amounts of practice. I was three to six hours a day on top of school and homework.

I quit as soon as I got to college, but the whole violin thing meant that a sizable portion of my childhood was spent alone in a practice room with, as my brother likes to joke, nothing but the cinder blocks for friends. And then there was Sarah. The last of three sisters, she'd grown up surrounded by people, and so had this easy way with them. Sarah was the kind of person who would literally brighten at the site of someone, almost no matter who that person was, I remember thinking.

And it felt like fun just inevitably found her. For example, there was a brief time in our 30s when we both lived in New York City. When I remember one random Tuesday after work, I happened to meet up with Sarah for dinner, and I asked how her day was. Sarah explained what for her had been a fairly typical day, and though I don't remember the details, I vividly remember the sentence that went through my head immediately after hearing it.

Why do I never end up on a pirate ship in the middle of the Hudson River? During that time period, a sentence like that probably went through my head two out of every five times I talked to Sarah. So I think that's all the Sarah-Blessed context you need, to appreciate the story you're about to hear. This particular story, I guess, starts at my ten-year reunion.

Yeah. In 2004, about ten years after we graduated, Sarah and a couple of her female friends decided to return to campus for their reunion. They weren't going in an overly earnest, I miss my college kind of way. I think this was half ironic.

And I think somehow one of us had found out about a party, you know, like a party that was being held by actual seniors, and we went. And you went in the spirit of what was it like, you know, we're clowning, we're like crashing? Yeah, I think it was total party crashing. It was also hilarious to be hanging out with, you know, I guess what we thought of as kids, ten years younger.

But, I mean, it felt so familiar. It's exactly what we wanted because it was like being, I don't really know again, you know, it was that feel. So they make their way to this off-campus house where music is blurring and a large number of alcohol-drenched college students are littered across the lawn. I remember we hung out a lot in the backyard because we felt a little bit out of place.

And then finally we made like, I was hanging out in the house proper and like there was like this really fun dance floor happening. Just, I feel like it was almost like the crowds parted in a certain way. And this kid, this guy, comes over and he, and from what I remember, he like, was like basically ordering me to dance. It was like dance floor now.

Now this is Sara Blust we're talking about. I was not one to say no. So besides the sky, whoever he was, was attractive. He was really cute and he had like dark hair and pretty eyes and a little shorter than me and definitely a senior.

That's, you know? What do you mean definitely a senior? Well, he was certainly like a college student. And I think at that point, you know, I was feeling so different because I'd been living in New York City for ten years and you know, I'd kind of started my own way.

I don't want you to get the wrong idea about Sara. She's not the kind of person who typically flirts with random college seniors. Today she's the director of two sexual and reproductive health clinics in New York. And she was well on her way to becoming the director of two reproductive health clinics by the time of the reunion.

So she wasn't exactly itching to take a college kid seriously. But, um, wow, he was really super nice and, you know, it's really, really fun. So, yeah, so we danced and danced and then it was like, you know, getting to that awkward part of the party where the beer is gone. Fortunately, Dan, that was the guy's actual name, Dan, had the foresight to stow an emergency six pack in his room.

And so we ended up going up to his room and, you know, hanging out and, um, discreet fade to black. Okay, so then what happened? So then the morning came, it was kind of brutal. I was totally hungover and, you know, we couldn't dally because his parents were about to arrive because it was his graduation.

So we're like kind of getting it all together and, you know, kind of preparing to like get out of that, you know, get out of the house. And, um, yeah. And then at a certain point he said, so Sarah, what's your last name? Which was kind of funny because we had to spend all this time together.

But right. He was Dan. I was Sarah. We didn't know anything else really about each other.

Um, and so I said, plus Sarah, plus and he like completely flips. He completely flips out and I just remember him like, he did this thing and he like jumped out of bed and he was like, oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.

Like I thought, did I just sleep with my brother? Like, am I related? Cause like, you know, here's my last name and he freaks out. So I'm like, what is going on?

Like, it felt like the room had tilted. Like, like just the world had just tilted all of a sudden. This of course is Dan, the cute kind senior who learned my friend Sarah to his room with promises of caps blue ribbon. He confirms that when he first heard the name Sarah Blust, he pretty much lost his mind and started screaming at the top of his lungs.

And I'm like, Sarah, you're not going to believe this. You're not going to believe this. I have to tell you this story, the story within the story. Dan's story starts at Keep Cottage.

Same place I met Sarah my first year at Oberlin. Dan, as a freshman, had lived there too. And he says one day he was hanging out in the lounge on the ground floor. And there were, you know, there were bookshelves.

And on the bookshelves were like old photo albums, old books, you know, old like textbooks that people had left behind. So Dan picks up one of the photo albums. You know, these were all people who had lived in Keep before some time in the distant past. And I was just flipping through and just sort of like looking at them and just started to sort of like wonder what their lives were like.

Did they do the same thing that I was doing then? Like sitting in the lounge and waiting for people to, you know, come and distract them. All those other lives. What were those other people like?

There was one photograph that stuck out to me and I can't say, you know, I never really could put my finger on why that particular photo stuck out to me. But you know, there was a girl looking a little bit maybe dazed in the foreground and a guy sitting on a bed, not looking at the camera in the background. And I said, I want to know who this person is. I wonder what her life was like.

Luckily the photo contained additional information. There was a name on the back. Sarah Blust. So I pulled the photograph out of the photo album.

I brought it upstairs. I sat down on my computer and instead of doing my homework, I wrote a brief short story. Like a one page story about the person in the photograph. I know this sounds a little unusual.

It is a little unusual. But Dan made up a whole fictional story about a redhead named Sarah Blust. Someone with two sisters, like the real Sarah Blust, who, like the real Sarah, goes to college and maybe smokes a little too much weed. Now Dan hadn't seen this story since graduation, but we were actually able to retrieve a copy from the carcass of his 20 year old candy blue apple computer due to the superhuman efforts of a San Francisco based computer expert named Mitch.

Thanks Mitch. Anyway, the main focus of Dan's story is Sarah's involvement with this fictional guy named Matt. After the story, Sarah and Matt circle each other, drawn, but not quite sure what to make of the strange connection they feel. And in the end, they don't end up together.

In Dan's imagination, it's this made up character Matt, who takes the photo that he found. Here's the last paragraph. Two weeks before the school year broke into summer vacation, Matt came and knocked on Sarah's door and keep. He brought with him this picture and gave it to her.

That day, he told her that he really cared about her and wanted to see her more often. She held onto the picture all summer, keeping it as a memento of Matt and her tragic love. She did not realize this picture was in storage when she moved out. She now and then thinks of Matt on her way to work or when playing with the kids.

She wonders where this picture is. Little does she know it is on the wall of Keep Cottage. Oh my God, that is insane. Had you ever done anything like that before?

Or was there something in this photo? Hmm. At the time, it really felt like a random act. Like I was just doing something to amuse myself at random.

And Dan didn't just write a story about Sarah Bloss. He also posted said story of Sarah Bloss with her photo on the door of his room where it stayed until the end of the school year, at which point Dan says it went into a trash can and he never ever thought of it again. At all until commencement week when I met Sarah Bloss. I was like, you know, I did not believe a word he was saying, but I actually not believe a word he was saying.

I could believe it, but it just I wasn't believing it. I was believing it and not at the same time if that's possible. And he said, no, it's real. And he pulls out his laptop and he opens it up and he like points this file that has my name on it.

And I almost lost my mind. Like, how is it possible that you meet someone for the first time and they have a story about you, a file with your name on it? On their computer. On their computer.

I mean, what is that? I want to pause for a second because what I'm interested in is the stories people tell themselves. So I want to map their stories at each stage. For Dan, what had happened between him and Sarah the night before his graduation was very unambiguous.

This was solid one night's dance territory. Yes, he had asked for Sarah's last name, but it wasn't for particularly sentimental reasons. Was it just like, I have to be a gentleman, I should know both of the names of the women I sleep with or was it like, you know, I'm going to stalk her. So last names would be helpful.

I mean, you know, I thought maybe we can hang out again and maybe you can get lucky twice. Exactly. Sarah felt the exact same way. She thought very reasonably that Dan was incredibly young and had a lot of growing to do.

So thank you, no thank you. I mean, Dan had post-graduation plans. The kind of post-graduation plans parents approve of about maybe going to medical school and becoming a doctor. And oh yeah, that's right.

He had a gig starting in the fall. Well, I was going to go into the Peace Corps and do public health work. I had been assigned to go to Central Asia. Were you excited about that plan?

I was. I was very excited about that plan. But on the car ride home, Dan started thinking about what had happened. Objectively, it was just crazy.

Dan only had scraps of information about this person Sarah blust. This person he had first imagined when he was a freshman staring at her photo. He knew that she was in public health, as was he. That she was a good dancer, as was he.

And he took these scraps and as we inevitably do, started weaving them into a story. A new story. One with an impressive series of coincidences that when you stepped back did look a lot like fate. I remember there was this sort of like, I remember that the sun was setting and I was driving into the sunset.

And the thought just occurred to me. I was like, I'm going the wrong way. I need to drop out of the Peace Corps. I moved to New York.

I have to go and see this woman. Yeah. I don't want to seem like I'm judging Dan for changing the whole course of his life based on what was really pretty slim evidence plus one coincidence. I understand the lore of the story he was taken with.

And I myself obsessively tell stories as a way to navigate the world. I'm like the queen of hopeful projection. This kind of strange, feverish storytelling started when I was young. A habit I picked up in the practice room as a way to escape.

I would walk in little circles and make up stories about myself and other people. In college, I did this almost every day. I'd walk in little circles for hours, usually until my legs ached. And I was extrapolating from what really happened to what I hoped would happen in the future.

Say I'd have some small encounter. Maybe a teacher would offer a kind word. Maybe a boy would nod in my direction. And my imagination would take it from there, build a whole life on those scraps.

In my mind, I'd visualize the look of the teacher as they offered me the selective internship that would lead to a dazzling career in public policy or law or for a very brief period during my senior year silk screening. Of course, I'd always kept this little circles habit secret from everyone. I was aware it was not normal behavior. The one person who knew about it was Sarah.

When we lived together in college, she accidentally discovered it. I was probably reading a book or doing some homework and I heard this like, quick! And it was just like, over and over and over and over again and it hit me a while to realize what it was. And then I realized it was you.

But Sarah didn't seem to mind. Didn't seem to think I was a freak at all. In fact, the opposite. I don't know.

I found it personally. I found it really endearing. Yeah. Thing is, as I've gotten older, I've grown more wary of this kind of storytelling.

Conscious of how often the stories we tell ourselves lead us down the wrong path. I remember that the sun was setting and I was driving into the sunset. And the thought just occurred to me. I was like, I'm going the wrong way.

What happened with Dan and Sarah, the wild serendipity of it, gave it the silhouette of one of the most popular stories in American life, the Faded Love Story. I think the Faded Love Story and the idea that romantic love is the one relationship that can fulfill you has a unique weight and primacy. It's the kind of story that displaces other stories, easily sweeps them aside. Which is what happened with Dan.

He dropped out of the Peace Corps, drove to New York, and instead of working in public health, got a job at the stereo exchange in Manhattan. On his way to this unglamorous new life, he wrote Sarah an email, framing his new plan in the most casual, non-threatening, just happened to be dropping everything and moving to your city way possible. Sarah responded with, whoa, that's a lot, not sure about that. Dan then responded, understand, seems reasonable, I'm aware I don't really know you.

All I'm saying is that we should go on some dates, see what happens. Sarah told me about all of this at the time, and honestly, I was pro. She'd had a string of boyfriends who didn't seem like good partner material. And I could tell right away that Dan was solid, which from the perspective of the anxious friend, was a relief.

Sarah also saw that Dan was a good guy with good values, and she thought he was fun, but she obviously had real reservations. I liked him a lot, like I felt like there was this really incredible connection, but I was also terrified that I had this responsibility for changing someone's life so drastically. Did it feel like he was actually seeing you, or did you feel like you don't even know who I, this is just a projection? Um, I think it was both.

I think it was both. Yeah, I think I thought that he didn't really know what he was getting into. Particularly, what he was getting into in one significant way. Sarah was past 30 and was very clear she wanted children.

I was in this moment of like thinking about kids, I suppose. And so I hadn't, you kind of, I couldn't believe, right, that I could enter into a relationship with someone just coming out of college. But there was a real understanding that the two of us had, you know, with each other. Dan hadn't been planning on having kids so early, but he had been planning on having kids, and he felt like the most important thing was to find the right partner.

And if that turned out to be Sarah, he was game. So they decided to go on some dates. Their first was a bar and red hook that Sarah picked. Then there was the date the ruler ring where Dan broke up, what they both agree were truly killer moves.

They had this comfortable vibe, and it was really easy to talk. Really, there was just one problem with this whole situation for Dan. You see, Sarah Blust, like the rest of us, was nursing her own romantic story. And the other person she was imagining didn't look anything like Dan, because her hopes centered so squarely on music.

Music has always been critical to Sarah. She plays the drums, but also guitar, and sings. In fact, music is what brought us together. Our first year of college, we founded an alternative girl band called Succubus, which played all four years.

After college, Sarah went on to other bands, many, because music just lights Sarah up. In your mind at that time, what was the romantic fantasy that you were imagining? Oh, so sparkly. Being in a band with some of that I loved, you know, and like, play amazing music and that we would just have this incredible creative life together, you know?

This of course is a common romantic fantasy, which like Dan's we are fitted for each other fantasy doesn't always work out well. Unfortunately for Dan's version of the fantasy, one day several months after his arrival, Sarah Blust went to a concert, the show of a moderately famous indie band she'd long admired, and the drummer became quite smitten with Sarah as she was with him. And it kind of pulled me into a community that I was, you know, in awe of, I guess I was really kind of starstruck. Poor Dan didn't stand a chance.

He was science, not music. And the new guy, the drummer, in addition to being closer and aged to Sarah, he was just as enthusiastic about their coming future. He was very much like, we're gonna make this happen. You know, he lived in Philadelphia at the time.

Did he move to New York to be with you too? Yes. Oh my God, are you fucking kidding me? No.

He moved to New York and he moved in with me. Oh shit, I totally somehow missed that. Wait a second, so you had two people moved to New York for you? I guess so.

How come nobody ever moved to New York for me? Put another way, why do I never end up on a pirate ship in the middle of the Hudson River? In the interest of journalistic transparency, I will tell you that I was extremely and correctly anti-drummer from the beginning. I was firmly team Dan.

I made this case to Sarah repeatedly, as is my practice. But in that moment, she was too taken by the story that she carried in her head. Kind of musician partner that I was supposed to be with that was just kind of getting in the way of me kind of appreciating Dan. Yeah.

I guess I just wasn't feeling it. I guess I just wasn't feeling it. I just kind of remember there was sort of like a fading out. I think she had a boy.

She got a boyfriend. That made it pretty clear. After about a year of hanging out on the sidelines, Dan gave up and moved on. Eventually he did become a doctor.

Today he's a professor of medicine. He specializes in HIV and AIDS. 20 years on, it's clear that the story he constructed on his ride home from college wasn't true. But he says in that story, he discovered a useful lesson that he carried forward and that shaped his behavior when he finally met his wife.

I think part of what I had learned from my experience with Sarah was that you can build this whole fantasy world about someone, this kind of have these romantic ideas and then reality can be very different. And I think that that was something I learned and learned to be cautious of in myself. Do you have any regrets? No.

Do you ever think of Sarah? Do you ever think, oh, maybe that could have worked in their slightly different circumstances? Not really. Not since I met my wife.

As for Sarah, like Dan, she's married and has a beautiful kid with the same red hair and joy as his mother. But she'll tell you straight up that there were moments during her single life when she really regretted that she didn't see the great person standing in front of her. She said she saw Dan as this 23-year-old kid, but now feels like he was actually probably more mature than she was. In fact, she's kind of like the Sarah Blust in the story that Dan wrote before they met.

That Sarah Blust didn't end up with a guy from Keep, but every once in a while remembers him. Like what's the thing that you learned from this or what is the... Yeah. Well, I think that when you're presented in life with something that seems like a guest, like a gift, even if you have other preconceived notions, maybe you're wrong.

The story that I was telling myself about who my perfect partner should be or would be, like that wasn't really a story that was helpful to me. I guess that's the cue for sad music to play. But on the other hand, isn't that also a story that might not be true? I mean, maybe if Sarah had chosen Dan, I'd be here telling you a different version.

One more Dan confronted with the reality of actual babies in his 20s, bolts the scene. That's the whole thing about stories, though, isn't it? You can never tell if one is true or not, and there's always a new one beckoning. But here's the thing.

I am the one who is telling this story, so I can tell it however I want. And I don't want to end it with a sad soundtrack, because as Sarah would tell you, she doesn't feel sad. Sarah's soundtrack is punk and pop and marching bands and lullabies, and sure, some sad core, but every life has some sad core. Speaking of music, I'll leave you with this.

A song from the back catalog of Sekibith. The band Sarah and I started our freshman year. When she played the drums with her eyes closed, I played a green electric guitar. Together, we blazed a trail of punk rucklery across Merced Central Ohio.

At least legal, to just produce her on our show. Coming up, strangers come into your house, look at all your stuff, size you up. They think they know you. How close can they get?

That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Lilly Sullivan, sitting in for Ira Glass. Our show today, The Lives of Others.

Stories about when you find yourself thinking about people you barely know or don't know it all. Putting together this week's show, I was thinking a lot about the film The Lives of Others, a movie about East Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's about a Stasi Agent whose job it is to spy on a playwright. For you, I have to humanize my son, Anast.

Put him a lion's hand, and for him he's tried and cut. For most of it, you watch the Stasi Agent, whose life is bare, austere, alone. As he listens in on the life of this playwright, whose life is full of art, beauty, sadness. You watch the Agent and headphones, eavesdropping on the apartment he's bugged.

He reads the book The Playwright reads, listens to the most personal conversations with his girlfriend, and he starts to become moved by the playwright's life. As the agent, we always see listening in alone in a dark room, comes to care for the writer, to the point where he eventually tries to protect him. What I remember most about the film is the ache, the sense of longing, and the distances they always are between people. But then there are these moments where there can be this portal of emotion from your life to someone else's.

There are other jobs where thinking about someone else's life is just built into it. We're wondering what that's like, in jobs with much lower stakes than being a government spy. Like pet sitting. That's what I've three's about.

One of our other producers here, Olivia DeCornfeld, realized pet sitting is a job just like that. He's got two of a dozen pet sitters who confirmed it and has this story about two of them. We're calling Zach if these dogs could talk. Here's Aviva.

With most jobs, you have some sort of relationship with the person you work for. You see them in the office or wherever it is you work. But pet sitting is one of the few jobs where you're only there if the other person isn't there. The job is to cosplay as the pet owner.

Yeah, most of them have me sleep in their beds because they want the routine of wherever the dogs sleep. They want me to sleep with them. So I'm sleeping in their beds, in their bedroom. I'm cooking in their kitchen.

I'm messing with all the algorithms on their streaming services. This is Elle. She's been sitting a couple of years ago. She made a point to tell me she never snoops.

In fact, she asks people to leave everything she'll leave out on the counter so she doesn't have to go looking for anything. But even without snubing, so much of the pet owner's private life is so nakedly on display. What they watch on Netflix, what they have in their fridge. You can't help but glean bits of information about the person you're standing in for.

Pretty young couple. I think they want to read. They always have the book on both nights and I've never seen either bookmark move. And sometimes the stack of books get higher, but they never go lower.

Elle sort of ambiently wonders about all her clients. She's in it for the dogs. But there was one client in particular that she found herself thinking about because their house felt different than the others. There was two huge gaming setups.

So it looked like they either games next to each other or with each other. It just felt very copacetic. They felt like they really were suited for each other. This togetherness side by side gaming is not typical.

Elle sat for another couple where the guy had his music room, the woman her crafting table, very separate hobbies. That's way more common, she says. I also like how much this couple seemed to prioritize comfort. Their sofa was basically just giant pillows, like down pillows.

So it was just like basically a giant bed. And for me I was like, oh that just felt really romantic. They couldn't help but melt into each other. Just to be clear, Elle's never met the husband.

Never seen the two of them together. She has no idea what they're like as a couple. But she liked to imagine them sitting on their big comfy couch chatting agreeably, deciding what they wanted to do that day. And Elle's imagination, arriving at a decision was always easy for them.

But just felt like they agreed on things a lot. And again I have no proof of that whatsoever. But for me that's what it seemed like they would look at each other and be like, hey, do you want to do this? And it was just kind of known by both parties.

Did you ever feel jealous of their relationship? Oh definitely. But this was also right after my divorce. And my ex husband and I had very different interests.

My ex left me for a Pilates instructor. And I'm not a Pilates gal. So I think for me it was seeing this couple and to be honest, they kind of looked more like me, plus eyes. And when she had never been able to have been together for like the teen years and met in college.

So like for me it was just, oh, these people found their person. Elle started dog sitting for this couple about a month after her marriage fell apart. Her ex has been, was a real plastic on the furniture kind of person. Definitely not into comfort.

She said he never relaxed. And for me the idea of lounging and just relaxing and melting into someone. Yeah, that was definitely something I really craved, especially coming out of that relationship. I would spend days alone in this couple's house, on her own for the first time in over 10 years.

Like she was in some strange, on-set audition for her life she hoped to have for herself one day. One day, just as Elle was about to head over to the couple's house to dog sit. She got a text. And it was from an unknown number because I never dealt with the husband.

And it just said, we no longer need you. We'll still pay you for the week. And that was it. And it was weird to me because he and I never spoken.

It was always me and the wife. So to hear from him was odd in general, but then I was just so curt and done. So what do you think when you got his text? My mind started racing because I was like, well, did someone end up in a car accident?

Did something really bad happen? Again, I wasn't going to press because I couldn't go to my business. I'm kind of just the help. So I definitely was wondering if what happened to make them stop this vacation?

Because she was on a work trip. Like she was at a conference and he was going to meet her in that city. I forget what city it was. So I mean, my gut tells me that it was an affair.

But that was just me completely baking that up. Partly wondering to reach out to her, but I'm not really inappropriate. I don't know her. Elle, of course, recognizes that when big things happen in your life.

The dog sitter is not at the top of the list of people to fill in. This couple barely knew her. In fact, if she was doing her job right, when the couple came back home, there'd be no trace of her at all. Months passed and she didn't hear from them.

When Christmas rolled around, she sent the couple a holiday card like she does with all her clients. The card was returned to sender. I'm not going to say I was hurt by it because that's too far. But it would be a little sad.

And I really wasn't this oldie together. I want the whole family to be in touch. I wanted to reach out to the couple to find out if Elle was right, if they really did get divorced. But Elle reasonably didn't want me to reach out.

It felt like too much of an invasion of their privacy. And I realized not knowing the real answer. That's actually true to how these things go. You wonder about people you try to imagine their lives.

And mostly you don't get to know. For so many of the pet sitters I talked to, the things from the pet owners' lives that got to them and stuck with them were things they wanted for themselves. That was true for Elle. It's also the case for this other pet sitter I talked to, Perry, in a very different way.

Here are some things to know about Perry. She's 29. She's an acupuncture student. And a few months ago, she started pet sitting for a grieving family.

The dad of the family had just died. I literally met and went over things with their family of other pugs and their parrot like a few days after they were a funeral. So I'm feeling in for him in a grieving period. Perry's lost three close family members over the past few years.

So in a way, she felt like the exact right person to pet sit for this family. She knew how to be there for them while they were in the thick of it. The family had been a family of four. A mom and dad in their fifties and two grown kids in their twenties when at college, the other still living at home.

The mom and dad had always walked the two pugs together. After he died, the mom had tried taking the dogs out herself. But told Perry she felt a stabbing pain whenever she did. So Perry started walking the pugs five days a week, which meant she was always in and out of their house.

I haven't met the dad, but it's like I'm seeing like a negative of him in his own life, like his house and his like yard that apparently he designed the whole thing and animals and the kids and all the pictures and stuff. Like you can almost see the shape of him because the absence is so clear. Exactly. And he's there even if he's not there.

Perry started noticing that she would think about the dad while she worked. When she'd take the pugs for a walk, she'd think, oh, is it like for him to walk the pugs? How did he react when they barfed at all the other dogs? When she'd greet neighbors who clearly recognized the pugs, she'd think, they must know why I'm here, walking them.

Must be strange to see the wrong person holding a leash. One afternoon, Perry couldn't make it over to walk the dogs. She misplaced her phone, so she hopped on Facebook to find the mom's profile to send her a message there to let her know. On Facebook was like, obviously like pictures of her and the family.

There's a picture of him kind of like under my yard with the dogs leashed up. Like they're about to go and walk together and you know, just something that you know, but you don't, you know, if you imagine something, it's not the same as like seeing it. And so it makes it more real and it feels like, oh, like that's, that's must have been an important part of his life. You know, he's smiling and like, that's the dogs that I walk every day and that's the person who used to walk them.

It's weird how something you see in someone else's life can totally turn you around. About a month ago, Perry had a moment like this, but she still thinks about. They were all making crawfish in the kitchen and I was like letting the dogs back in and I was like, it's just like this like perfect little family scene and then the dad's not there and it's like, but you kind of picture how he would have fit into that little scene because you just get this little snippet of their life like that. And how do you picture he might have fit in?

I don't know. I feel emotional thinking about that. Like, I don't know. How come it makes you emotional, you think?

Um, well, my grandpa died like last month. For the fourth time in four years, Perry lost someone close to her. She was thrown back into that awful early phase of grief when everything feels hazy. The end of the crawfish dinner was right after her grandpa died.

And Perry said she felt like she was floating, kind of dissociated, just trying to get through it and get back for her grandpa's funeral the next day. I think the reason that it stands out in my memory is because, you know, just like seeing them as a family there and just like having fun together after like the other times I'd seen them all together, they were a little bit more somber and you know, it's just when you go through grief period and then when you kind of come out of it, you don't realize it when you're coming out of it. For Perry, who was just starting to grieve her grandfather, it was comforting to see the family begin to emerge out the other side. It wasn't within reach for her just yet, but it was nice to know it was there.

Aviva de Cornfeld is one of the producers of our show. All the people's lives got me pulling and pulling in. I don't even see my own right in front of my eyes. All the people's lives got me running and running in circles till I see the worth of steady strength.

All the people thinking whatever they're gonna think and that don't mean a thing till I let it win me over. Mine is but a life is all of everything breathing in breathe deep as it shows deep as it shows deep as it shows. Our program today was produced by Aviva de Cornfeld and me. The people who put our show together today include via Benin, Dana Chittis, Sean Cole, Michael Conate, Bethel Habte, Cassie Howley, Hannah Joffey Walt, Seth Lin, Tobin Lowe, Ella Mustafa, Stone Elson, Catherine Vreimondo, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Rummory, Elissa Ship, Laura Starcheski, Chris de Persuatala, Matt Tierney, Nancy Eptike and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sara Abdraman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Today is the last day for our office coordinator, Charlotte Sleeper.

She is off to New Zealand and almost her. Special thanks today to Ben Calhoun, Mary Fuller, Mitch Harris, John Paul Brammer, Levi Vank and Koshit on this. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free. This American life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, public radio exchange.