How to find love in a boring town
In the farming simulation game Stardew Valley, you can date residents of the tiny Pelican Town and eventually marry one and invite them to live on your farm with you. You build a relationship with someone by giving them things like two eggplants a week and remembering whether they like eggplants or not. While I love planning my harvest profits per season on an water-stained sticky note, I don’t feel the same flames of desire in the game of love as in money.
As a human, I’m attracted to people who are interesting, and the same goes for myself as a farmer. Unfortunately, all the eligible romance options in town are flat stereotypes. Being bisexual doesn’t help expand my options because there’s one boy and one girl of each stereotype:
Punks: purple-haired girl and boy in parent’s basement
Jocks: blonde girl and boy with football
Nerds: Town doctor with secret plane obsession and town nurse with secret robot
Artists: sculptor lady in the woods and writer man on the beach
Eccentrics: anime kid and crystal girl
Unfortunates: young woman in her alcoholic mom’s trailer and alcoholic young man
Who would you choose as your life partner? I would choose the prettiest of the eccentrics or unfortunates thinking there is some intrigue or pathos underneath, but no! Crystal Girl is really just into crystals, and Trailer Girl’s whole tragedy is that she doesn’t much enjoy living in her alcoholic mother’s trailer.
My frosty, fallow heart has not stopped me from maxing relationships to at least eight platonic heart levels with all of these small-town, simple folk. I even gave bouquets from the general store signaling romantic interest to Writer Man, Punk Girl, Punk Boy, and Nerd Girl (Punk Boy’s stepsister, so it does feel a little fucked-up to carry on like this.) The bouquets unlock an additional two romantic hearts for a maximum relationship level of ten hearts. Each heart attained triggers a new interaction event with that person. After ten interactions, you can propose marriage by giving them a Mermaid Pendant purchased from a mysterious fisherman who appears on the beach only in the rain. So, the mechanics of relationships in the valley are pretty similar to relationships in real life. Except in real life, you can’t see how many hearts you have.
I resigned myself to life as a wealthy land-owner in passionless polyamory, filling my time with adding and redecorating wings of my farmhouse. Some days I delegated farm chores to spherical fairies and forayed into the mountain mine with my flame sword and neon purple, iridium-armored boots in a hunt for glory and some kind of purpose. One day, I reached the bottom of the mine, 100 floors below the surface. My spirit was totally lost. Then I received a letter inviting me to take the bus to a place out-of-town called Calico Desert. I always passed the bus stop as I jumped into the mine cart that zipped to the mine, but I never knew the bus was still in service. I paid the alcoholic mother her fare, and she drove me for who knows how long because everything blacked out until we arrived.
Stepping out of the bus, the world was different. Instead of green grass and oaks, there was sand and palm trees stretching interminably. The music twanged and reverberated like rippling heatwaves. The only visible building was a bit off the road: a gaudy, hot-pink brick tower called The Oasis. Inside the tower was where I met Sandy. She stood behind a shop counter and welcomed me to the desert. Her profile image showed a confusingly swirling starry blue dress, fuschia red hair tumbling down her shoulders, and a haughty side-glance reminiscent of Writer Man. To avoid having to think of him during my vacation time, I installed someone’s alternative, cuter Sandy portrait.
She sold me exclusive starfruit seeds and ice cream and told me of the dangerous desert caves. I gave her one of the boring old daffodils littering the ground in spring, and she was elated: “Ooo! I absolutely love getting flowers from the valley. I’m so happy!” Eventually, the sky darkened, and I was forced to ride back to my bed before the clock struck 2 am, like Cinderella but with two extra hours. If you don’t obey bedtime, you will pass out and wake up in your bed anyway, finding a letter from the doctor or a friend saying they found you, carried you to your bed, and took some of your money.
It became my new delight to cultivate and deliver different flowers to Sandy every day, and our hearts grew. There is no option to give Sandy a bouquet, meaning she is not a marriage candidate: all her ten hearts are platonic. I knew this, and I visited her anyway, enjoying her warmth like sand on my toes: “Hello hello, sweetie! I’m so glad that the bus is back in service. It was starting to get lonely out here….I almost went out of business. Hey, but now you’re here to buy a whole bunch of seeds… right, sweetie?”
Sandy entranced me because she is no flat concept, despite her name. She’s not some “desert girl” stereotype, and even if she were, she’d be a desert woman. Sandy’s not complaining about her life or stuck in some role the village put her in. She’s out here on her own, surrounded by glaring sun, running her business. Like her dress with a shoulder spike coming from nowhere, she is mysterious. Why stay out here when she loves the valley so much? How can she stay in business? I savored every new sentence she told me about herself, and I loved her, even though her name makes me picture the Spongebob squirrel and my Aunt Sandy.
One day, we reached the last of the ten hearts. After I gifted her flower of the day, summer spangle, one of the rare varieties I’d been growing, I imagined she softened her vibrant voice: “If I didn’t have this shop to run, I’d come back to the valley with you for a day or two… just you and me on the old farm.” She added, “You’ll just have to visit me more often so I don’t get depressed.”
Sandy is more entrancing than anyone else in Stardew Valley, but Sandy will never live with me, and I’ll never have to live with her. We both love our own lives of freedom. For neither humans nor farmers, is marriage the proof and end goal of love. Love is proved by the slain bodies of nightmarish desert cave monsters in an endgame mine you’ll never reach the bottom of. Love looks like a greenhouse full of flowers you never would have planted due to their low profit margin.