Everything you can learn from recreating your relationship on the Sims

On the literal first day the Sim versions of me and my boyfriend moved in together, she lit herself on fire making dinner. He stood there and watched her burn. When I repeatedly commanded him to extinguish her, he instead ran outside to continue watching her burn from a safer distance.

Things weren’t going according to plan.

Replicating my recent IRL decision to move in with my SO in the classic life simulator game was supposed to help ease some of my anxieties. It’s a time-honored tradition, recreating our lives in the Sims, providing some semblance of control over the chaos of existence in the real world and the unknowable outcomes of big life events. 

In the Sims 4, you can choose your own personality traits, make yourself as beautiful as you want, compel anyone to fall in love with you, turn off people’s free will when it gets in the way, force your avatar to tirelessly self-improve, have job security in your dream career with a guaranteed path to growth and success, and (for millennials in particular) even live out the fantasy of owning a home.

I needed that.

As someone who’s been devotedly self-partnered for most of my life, the whole “committed relationship” thing has been a steep, year-long learning curve of never truly knowing what the fuck I’m doing. 

When is the right time to drop the L-word? How do I introduce him to my batshit family? Will he still like me after seeing how frizzy my hair gets in the morning? Can I ever learn to trust this foreign feeling of love and security? What happens if it’s taken away? When will he realize he’s too good for me? 

There isn’t a manual for how to not royally fuck it all up. And that keeps me up at night.

Yet still, even with the ever-present spiral of apocalyptic doubts swirling through my head, I agreed to move in with (ostensibly) my first-ever real longterm partner anyway. Because the only thing that outweighed my clinical anxiety and crippling insecurity was the certainty that I’d found the best possible person to take that leap with.

It’s this certainty that helped me cope. Well, that, and the Sims.

So after I went ahead with this decision IRL — after a move-in day from actual hell, days without WiFi or heat in the dead of winter, surrounded by an insurmountable pile of boxes we’d rather Marie Condo than unpack, able only to pray that his cat and my dog would get along, eating on the floor while obsessively scouring every online furniture outlet for anything that’d fit a living room so oddly shaped that only Satan could’ve designed it — I booted up my PC and did it all over again in the game.

There still wasn’t a manual for how to not fuck up living together. In the real world, I couldn’t control every facet of life to ensure the best possible outcome. But control is basically the Sims in a nutshell.

Maybe if I ran a simulation that accounted for as many of our IRL obstacles as possible, then the path to guaranteed success would reveal itself. I could replicate our whole situation: the stressors of our demanding careers, co-parenting our fur babies, paying bills, fitting both our lifestyles into the confines of our new apartment, and every other struggle that came with loving the person you cohabitate with.

At the very least, maybe I’d figure out what furniture would suit our Satanically-shaped living room.

I spent hours meticulously recreating our faces, our fashion senses, our personalities, our pets, every inch of our two-bedroom apartment in east Los Angeles. Sure, I used the classic motherlode cheat code to give us a cushion of cash so I could accurately replicate our apartment right away. Overall, though, I did my best to stick within the limits of our real-world constraints. 

The fruits of this tireless labor was an uncannily true-to-life virtual dollhouse of my current living situation, to the point where things would happen in the game only to then happen hours later IRL. Our talkative, spoiled, playful kitten (all attributes I gave her in the game) would meow at us in the middle of the night from the bedside table, making our Sims cranky when they woke up for work in the morning. And, sure enough, when 4 a.m. rolled around in the real world …

The pitch-perfect accuracy often backfired. My hypothesis that this experiment would bring me comfort was quickly proven wrong within mere minutes of playing. The dinner fire was just the first piece of evidence that everything that possibly could go wrong would go wrong.

Not only did I have to witness my SO watch me burn alive with little to no concern (leading me to harbor slight resentment toward him IRL for his virtual crimes), but the Sim versions of me and my boyfriend instantly disliked each other. Usually, getting Sims to start dating takes little more than a few romantic exchanges and, bam, you’re committed and woo-hooing before you know it.

But not us! 

No matter how neutral I kept our initial interactions, like friendly chats about our designated interests (I was a geek, he was a music lover), it inexplicably resulted in negative friendship points every time. I kept at it, though, even though both our Sims kept trying to escape the conversation to play video games (honestly, also accurate). Soon enough, it was our first kiss, and I got the jolt of reassurance I’d been looking for as memories of our real first kiss came flooding back.

Simulation continued to mimic life in the eeriest and most troublingly realistic ways, though.

Our careers and ambitions kept getting in the way of spending time together. I’d have to choose to keep my Sim at work late to write about a breaking news story, or she’d come home in a bad mood because internet trolls tore apart her well-sourced but controversial article. 

My boyfriend, a professional musician both IRL and in this virtual dollhouse, worked opposite hours to my schedule, giving us barely enough time to enjoy the life we were working so hard to build together. We’d both end our days too tired to even woo-hoo. The house was a perpetual mess on account of our busy schedules and the two fur children pooping, peeing, scratching, and muddying everything — which also left us in bad moods.

Maddeningly, my Sim gained weight while eating the same exact food as my boyfriend’s Sim, who somehow kept his figure. Also inexplicably, my Sim “aged up” from Young Adult to Adult long before my boyfriend’s, salt in the wound for my (admittedly petty) real-life insecurity that he’s a year younger than me. It also happened to my beloved dog son, leading to the traumatic event of me watching him die of old age on the dining room floor before the grim reaper came to take him away. Then my Sim wept uncontrollably over his urn, with a plate of food still in hand because, evidently, she inherited my real-life habit of depressive eating.

The dead dog was the final straw, I decided. My Sim was getting old. My dog’s ghost haunted our backyard. Fuck simulation. Fuck the experiment. Fuck realism.

I punched in the cheat code for more money until we were millionaires. I turned our modest, sparse backyard into a wonderland complete with a jacuzzi, rose petal pool, and full-blown obstacle course for my ghost dog. I made our Satanically-shaped living room bigger. I got my Sim her own personal gym, hired a gourmet chef to cook us healthy meals, and a maid to keep the house clean. I researched how to bring dead pets back to life and, reader, you bet your ass I not only resurrected my fur baby, I also gave him a special treat to keep him young forever. For good measure, I adopted another dog, something my partner and I fantasized about doing IRL often.

You bet your ass I not only resurrected my fur baby, I also gave him a special treat that’d keep him young forever.

I mean, it’s not like the Sims could account for all the obstacles that came with living together anyway, I rationalized. It’s a robust life simulator, sure, but there isn’t monthly rent, student loan debts, a shared laundry room, lack of parking on a busy Los Angeles street, parking tickets, childhood trauma, emotional baggage, fear of intimacy, or any of the other countless human variables that can make building a lasting relationship feel like a fool’s errand. 

And who was I kidding? I’d already stretched the boundaries of realism from the start, giving us double the square footage and myself a flatter stomach and more striking features than my genetics would ever allow for. 

As I lavished in freeing myself from the shackles of reality, swimming happily with my resurrected forever-puppy in my marble swimming pool, I realized I’d gotten the purpose of the Sims all wrong.

The answer to my endless spiral of doubt and uncertainty did not lie in meticulously recreating it in a virtual world, where I could see all my worst fears (and some I hadn’t even imagined) play out. No. The answer to my anxieties lay in playing out fantasies of the best possible outcomes, including the ones so unrealistic that they were literally impossible.

Trying to prepare yourself for the worst possible outcome won’t ensure a scary new chapter in your life works out. If anything, worrying and trying to control every possible variable will only make it more likely that everything goes wrong.

That wasn’t the only life lesson I learned from my Sim’s virtual journey, though.

Usually, the natural progression of any Sim relationship is to pretty immediately get hitched. For obvious reasons, that felt a bit weird to do in my situation. Yet the more I watched my age meter go up, edging closer and closer to the Elderly stage, the antsier I got. Was I really going to let my Sim die as a live-in girlfriend?

I kept finding excuses to put it off: We weren’t far enough in our careers to get married yet. My Sim needed to lose the extra weight first so she looked perfect in the wedding pictures. I needed to bring my dog back from the dead so he could be in attendance.

Though the specifics were different, it sounded eerily close to all the excuses I’d given myself for years to put off being in a longterm relationship: I didn’t have time because I needed to focus on school and then my career. I wasn’t skinny enough, so I needed to diet first before anyone would want to date me. I was too damaged and should go to therapy before even considering committing to someone.

So, once again, I said fuck it to realism, this time liberating myself from the shackles of my real-life commitment issues.

On my Sim’s wedding day, I dressed her and my boyfriend’s Sim in the most glamorous couture our endless simoleons could buy us. I spared no expense for our fur children, either, putting them in a tux and bow tie. I invited all the celebrity friends I’d made time for as guests, including Father Winter (the Sim version of Santa Claus). 

But the Sims had one last gut-punch to deliver before my virtual journey ended.

Within literal minutes of us tying the knot, I got a notification that my Sim was … pregnant! Despite never having clicked the command to woo-hoo for a baby or trying to get pregnant at all. But you know what, let’s just call that commitment exposure therapy — both for me IRL and for the Sim version of my boyfriend, who at first looked like he was going to puke before moving on to celebration.

I’d wanted my Sims experiment to give me a definitive answer to all the uncertainty that came with making a big life decision. But instead, it taught me that when it comes to making big life decisions, I should stop giving apocalyptic doubts more power than impossible fantasies. 

Who knows how any of this will turn out? Maybe my relationship will go up in flames. Maybe I’ll get married while Santa Claus sits in attendance as my honored wedding guest, then immediately have an immaculate conception. 

The point is that no one knows how this game ends. And that’s the beauty of playing it.