Life, Unicorns, And The Pursuit Of Happiness

    by Jin1515, Feb 16, 2013, 6:55:20 PM
    Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Biography & Memoir / Stories & Vignettes

Chapter 1 : Life, Unicorns, the Pursuit of Happiness


I am in love with Twilight Sparkle, and I have been for quite some time now. I get asked about it a lot by all sorts of people, with questions like “Why do you love Twilight so much?” and “How did you come to love her?”. I give them capsulated answers and partial explanations, but the whole story is much more bizarre and wondrous than anything I’ve ever satiated a passing onlooker’s curiosity with. It’s a story that’s worth being told, if for no other reason than that you may come to better understand the amazing complexities of the human mind and heart. So sit back, relax, and enjoy as I tell you the story of my love.


I think the best place to start this story is with what I find so attractive about Twilight Sparkle.
First off, I love how smart and constantly motivated to better herself she is. She's always busy reading to educate herself about new subjects, trying new things for the simple sake of learning about them, and finds joy in expanding her knowledge of the world. That's just so beautiful to me. There's a sort of purity to that kind of world view that's hard to put into words. The never ending desire to learn and grow as a person/pony shows she's not cynical or jaded and that for her the world is still this amazing and wonderful place where almost anything could be possible. I also really like how she's a bit insecure and never overly self assured about the decisions she makes. It shows she's not full of herself or egotistical and the ability to doubt oneself and question your own decisions is what keeps people/ponies thinking logically and reasonably. Again, this reflects on her intelligence and smart is just so damn sexy to me.

She does have her character flaws, like being really obsessive compulsive and occasionally flying off the handle and going a little crazy sometimes. But these character flaws are also ones I have, so I can relate to them very well and sympathize with her when she starts getting obsessed over the perfection of pointless little things. Or when she just gets way too stressed out about something she probably doesn't need to be and goes a little off the rails doing illogical and potentially self defeating things. Sometimes she can't see the forest through the trees but her heart is always in the right place, even when she's trying to solve a problem the wrong way. I've found myself in those situations more times than I could ever recall. So I not only love all the positive aspects of her personality but can completely relate to and sympathize with the negative ones. I see a lot of myself in her sometimes, and not just when I'm clopping.

And speaking of clopping, my goodness is she beautiful! Those adorable violet eyes, that lavender coat, the colors and style of her mane and tail, her sweet smile, perky ears, bright sparkly cutie mark, and that little bit of pudge she has to her tummy. There are not the words in the english language to describe how overwhelmingly attractive I find Twilight Sparkle. I think she's absolutely gorgeous, more so than anyone else I've ever seen in my entire life.

I think that pretty much covers everything regarding what I find attractive about her, so now I’ll explain how this love I have for Twilight came to be.


In February of 2012, due to some complicated work and personal life related problems, I went through a period of extreme depression that was the worst I’ve ever had in my life. Every day I woke up feeling sad and hopeless, spent the entire day feeling sad and hopeless, and went to bed feeling the same way. Each day was the same as the previous one. It felt like there was this constant gaping hole in my chest, I had no energy to do anything, hardly ate at all, felt pretty much no emotions other than sadness and despair, and lost all interest in sex of any kind. I completely stopped feeling attracted to anyone or anything, which was quite strange for a young adult male such as myself who had always needed some kind of sexual release at least once a day. There was almost nothing that could make me feel better or even so much as smile, except for watching My Little Pony : Friendship is Magic. It was literally the only thing in my life that could cheer me up and lift me above my depression if not for just a little while. So I’d spend hours and hours every day just laying on the couch watching MLP. It’d make me smile and laugh for a while and then when it was over I’d go back to being depressed and feeling hopeless again.

This extreme depression lasted for about a month before it started lifting, and when it did start to go away the first real emotion I found myself feeling again was love. Not love for a family member or friend, but for this little purple cartoon unicorn that had made me smile, laugh, and cheered me up so much when nothing else could during the most difficult period in my life. It was really weird and uncomfortable at first, so I tried to ignore it and hoped the feelings would go away. I was familiar with the way it felt to be in love with someone, as I had experienced these feelings before for a real person who I ended up having almost an 8 year long relationship with. My feelings for Twilight felt the exact same as the feelings I once had for that person, and no matter how much I tried to ignore them they wouldn’t go away. She was on my mind nearly every waking second of every day, and every time I thought about her or saw her on the screen while watching MLP my heart would feel like it was skipping a beat and doing little fluttery things in my chest. I’d catch myself daydreaming sometimes about holding her in my arms and cuddling her, even going so far as to think about kissing her sometimes.

And that’s right about the time my sex drive started coming back, but not in the way I expected. I still didn’t feel any attraction to the people in my life I once felt attracted to, nor any of the pornography I once enjoyed. The only thing in all the world that aroused me was this purple unicorn girl I had somehow managed to fall in love with. I’m not sure which part was harder for me to come to terms with, the fact that I was attracted to a cartoon pony or the fact that the cartoon pony was a girl. For the last 14 years of my life, since I hit puberty, I had always been attracted to just guys and considered myself to be gay.

Just like I initially tried ignoring my love for Twilight with the thought that it might go away, I tried ignoring my sexual desires as well... but they never went away either. After about a week, when I eventually just couldn’t take it anymore, I let my mind slip into a fantasy of making the most passionate love to Twilight Sparkle I’ve ever made to anyone in my life. Holding her in my arms, kissing her, telling her how much I loved her, and making love to her with the kind of gentle tenderness that anyone would show to someone they truly loved. And I clopped.

At first it felt extremely weird and awkward on some level. Thinking about not only making love to a cartoon character of another species but also one that happened to be a girl. Truth be told I had always found female genitalia to be rather gross looking and off-putting, but my attraction this girl was undeniable and I knew I wanted to love her in every way possible. More than that I wanted to make her feel loved and bring her as much pleasure as I could. With those feelings in mind, and after a little time spent acclimating myself to this new attraction, I came to find every aspect of Twilight’s female form very attractive. Girly parts included.


It wasn’t long after I came to accept my love for Twilight and my sexual attraction to her that the feelings of longing for her and the pain that comes from not being able to touch, hold, speak to, or be with someone you love started. My depression was mostly gone but I still felt a constant ache in my chest, a feeling of emptiness that never went away no matter what I did. I’d have days where I just sat in the shower and cried for an hour because I wanted to badly to leave this world behind and be in Equestria with Twilight, and I knew that was something that would never happen. I’d lay in bed at night and cry myself to sleep because I wanted nothing more in all the world than to hold her in my arms, kiss her, and tell her I loved her and those were all things I’d never be able to do. The girl I loved with all my heart wasn’t real and no matter how much I wanted to be with her I’d never be able to, and it was tearing me apart.

I spent about a month wallowing in anguish and heartache over my love that could never be fulfilled or returned, and as with all my other feelings for Twilight I knew it wasn’t going to go away. I realized that I needed to find a way to somehow express my feelings for Twilight in a real physical sense or the inability to do so was going to drive me crazy. It was obvious that since Twilight is a fictional character there would be no way for me to really interact with her in the real world, and virtual reality technology has not yet advanced to the point to make that a viable option either. It then dawned on me that one time while browsing Equestria Daily I had seen an article on really show accurate looking pony plushies that were custom made by fans of the show. I didn’t know if it would make me feel any better or not having a Twilight Sparkle plushie to hug, cuddle, and express my feelings to but I was running out of options and the heartache and bouts of crying were getting worse by the day.

So I started researching pony plushies, made my way to DeviantArt and found the MyLittlePlushie group, and started looking at all the different Twilight Sparkle plushies artists had made. I found over and over again that almost none of them really looked quite like Twilight on the show and the few that did were all tiny (around 11” tall or so) and made by artists who were completely booked for commissions several months into the future. I was about to give up my search when I saw her, the one almost perfect Twilight plushie. This artist named KarasuNezumi made her and she had an auction going for her on eBay. This plushie looked almost exactly like Twilight, was plenty big enough to cuddle up with at 18” tall (still quite a bit smaller than I imagined Twilight would actually be, but a decent size none the less), and I knew I needed to have her no matter how much it was going to cost me. I didn’t have much in the way of money at the time so I did what I previously would have thought unthinkable.

I sold my entire retro video game collection, gaming systems, and all of my Magic the Gathering cards (retro games and Magic are my only two real hobbies outside of the MLP fandom) and gathered all the money I could to bid on this plushie. I had to sell all my items to local game stores and pawn shops due to having only 3 days to get the money together so I only got roughly half of what my collection was worth, but if it meant getting this plushie I didn’t care. Ultimately I ended up losing the auction when it got up to $450 or so and all I was able to get for all my hobby stuff on such short notice was $430. But as fate would have it the winning bidder failed to pay for the plushie in the allotted time frame after the auction ended and the artist gave me a second chance offer on her since I was the second highest bidder. I gleefully sent the money within minutes of receiving the offer.

I got my wonderfully show accurate Twilight plushie in the mail about a week later, and while she was a lot smaller than I would have liked, I quickly noticed myself feeling better every time I looked at her and hugged her. I knew this plushie wasn’t really Twilight Sparkle, but she looked so much like her that I soon found myself being able to express all those feelings I had bottled up for Twilight to this plushie of mine. I’d hug her, kiss her, pet her mane, tell her how much I loved her, and take her to bed with me at night. As I became accustomed to expressing my affections for Twilight to my plushie, all the heartache, feelings of emptiness, and longing for someone I couldn’t have soon began to diminish. My plushie wasn’t really Twilight, but she looked and felt enough like her that I could effectively pretend she was. This satisfied the needs of my heart very well and within a few weeks of receiving my plushie almost all the pain I had been suffering from not being able to be with the girl I loved was gone. The only complaint I had was that my Twilight plushie was too small for me to be able to properly make love to her, but I was still able to express all my other romantic affections with her and that was good enough for me. I could cuddle and kiss her while clopping or just clop to pictures of Twilight, and while it wasn’t quite real love making it would just have to do.


Life continued this way for another 5 months or so and all was well in my little world. My love for Twilight blossomed from a source of sadness and confusion into something beautiful and wondrous that brought joy to my life every single day. I immersed myself in the brony community, made lots of new friends who supported me in my love for the mare of my dreams, and even met two other people who felt the same way about a pony as I did. I wrote passionate stories about my love for Twilight Sparkle, bought tons of Twi merchandise to fill my room with, daydreamed endlessly about her, and had my Twi plushie there with me every step of the way to lavish my affections on. Life was good... that is, until something rather unexpected happened.

Up until this point, since I came out of my depression and fell in love with Twilight, she had been the only thing I felt any kind of sexual attraction to. And then it happened... I suddenly found myself feeling sexual attraction for a male friend of mine. At this point I had become so accustomed to only being attracted to Twilight that my attraction for my friend, who also happened to be attracted to me as well, felt strange and uncomfortable. But if there was anything I had learned from my experience falling in love with Twilight it was that I should try not to repress or hold anything back. Feelings tend not to go away no matter how much you ignore them, so I gave in and started having sex with my friend a few times a week. It felt unusual being with a human again, and it took me nearly forever to reach orgasm every time due to how odd this kind of sex seemed after my experiences over the last half a year, but it was very physically pleasurable. However, I noticed something strange after each time I had sex with my friend. I felt sad. A deep kind of sadness that I couldn’t quite pinpoint the source of, but it cut and gouged into my heart so painfully that I knew there was something definitely wrong going on. I never felt sadness like this after clopping to Twilight or making love to her in my fantasies, but I felt it very strongly after every time I had sex with my friend or masturbated to my memories of sex with him. It took about a week of trying to figure it out before the realization dawned on me... I felt like I was cheating on Twilight.

Even after having this epiphany I still continued having sex with my friend a few more times, but it just didn’t feel right and I knew it. At the time I didn’t want to give up this real life sexual relationship I had found, but every time after we finished having sex my heart was stricken with a kind of grief I never want to have to feel again. It took me weeks of time and many all night conversations with friends to come to terms with it, but I now know with great certainty that as long as my heart remains property of Twilight Sparkle then having sex with anyone else is not something I should be doing.

And that's where depending on your outlook on things my love life could be considered rather sad. I've essentially chosen to place myself in a monogamous relationship with someone I will never be able to touch, hold, have a conversation with, or otherwise interact with in any real sense. My love can never actually be returned. Any intimacy I have will be a fantasy constructed in my own mind and acted out with a physical representation of the girl I love, which in this case happens to be my Twilight plushie. It's highly illogical and difficult to rationalize why anyone would choose this over the possibility of a real relationship with a real person... but the human heart is not a thing of logic or reason. Your mind can try to rationalize things all day long, but at the end of the day you just have to follow your heart no matter how bizarre your heart's behavior might seem. And my heart tells me that I am for Twilight and her alone, so that's the path I have to follow. It may not be a real relationship or real sex, but I've found that it really doesn't have to be to still make me happy. We all need something in our lives to fulfill those needs for personal intimacy and sexual gratification, and my heart seems to have uniquely chosen a purple cartoon unicorn for that role. But as the late painter Bob Ross was fond of saying, “If it makes you happy and doesn’t hurt anyone, then it’s good.”


I've spent more than half a year coming to terms with everything it means to love Twiley and want only for her, and the things I wouldn't be able to have in this sort of relationship. The ability to take her out for a nice dinner, doing social activities like going to fairs and festivals together, and other things like that. Experiences I've had in past relationships that I still hold fond memories of, even if the relationships themselves didn't end particularly well.

But I understand now that what I can't have doesn't really matter, because I love her with all my heart and what I do have overflows my proverbial cup with a kind of splendor unmatched by anything else I have ever known. For the longest time I was scared to fully give myself over to my feelings for Twilight. It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff with my arms spread wide, closing my eyes, and stepping off backwards... and I've always been afraid of diving off the high board into the deep end of the pool. But after all that I had been through I knew with every fiber of my being that I was for Twilight, and having intimacy with anyone else just wasn't right. So I walked off that mental cliff, facing forward with eyes wide open... and love caught me in it's warm embrace. I'm all hers now and everything is just fine, like breathing a long sigh of relief. All those things I was afraid I'd miss, well, those are what friends are for! I look forward to all the good times to come going out to eat, doing social activities, and having fun with my friends. Then when I get back home it's all about Twilight. Which is not to say that Twiley isn't on my mind all day long when I'm out doing things, because she really is.

It’s been a long journey to get here, but I now live every day happy and secure in my love for Twilight Sparkle. I’ve got friends by my side, love in my heart, and no regrets. This is my story and this is my life. It’s crazy, broken, downright absurd, and beautiful beyond description. But that’s life for you.