It’s just absolutely imperative that you are able to know the difference. For the longest time, I had felt so lost and confused about the nature of love and relationships. I was so anxious about the fact that I had had a few significant relationships that all ended up failing on me.
I had always imagined love to be this amazing magical feeling and none of those relationships that I was in could ever live up to the hype. There was a time where I thought that falling in love isn’t for everyone after all. I used to think that it was an experience that was only reserved for the lucky few – and I had missed out on it.
I was desperate. I really wanted to experience love in its purest form. I was waiting for a man to walk into my life – a man who could prove to me that love was real after all and that I was worthy of it. I was waiting for a man who would give me an experience that was different from any other.
I was waiting for a man to prove to me that he wasn’t a coward; that he was ready to take that deep dive into love with me. However, I never really met that guy. Every single man I was with turned out to be a fake or a coward. They were there for all the good parts but they just couldn’t rough it out during the bad.
And when I hit rock bottom, that’s when I made the decision to just focus on myself. That’s when I rededicated my life to building myself up from scratch. I felt like I had been bent and broken so many times in my failed attempts at love. Now, I felt like I really needed to devote more time and energy to taking care of myself. And that’s when I had a major epiphany. It’s when I started to love myself more wherein I really learned what true love is.
I learned that you have to WANT to fall in love with someone. You don’t need to NEED a person in order for you to have a relationship together. You have to be able to rely on yourself enough to make sure that you never end up needing another person in your life. And when that’s the case for you, that’s when you know that you’re ready to fall in love. There is a difference between needing and wanting a person and here they are.
1. You need a man when you are desperate. You want a man when you feel empowered.
Desperation is always difficult because it can drive you to do things that you would never typically do – things that might prove to be detrimental to you in the long run. When you are desperate, you are looking for instant gratification as opposed to long-term fulfillment.
When you are desperate, you risk settling for something that is completely beneath you; something that is less than what you are deserving of. But when you are empowered, you refuse to settle. You go out and you seek the love that you think you deserve. When you are empowered, you go and pursue love with a reckless abandon. And once you have it, you are going to fight to keep love in your life because you know just how valuable it really is.
2. You need a man if you are looking for a confidence boost. You want a man when you know that you’re worthy of him.
You are only looking for a man who can help validate your own existence and that’s sad. That’s a sign that you are so insecure about the state of your life that you feel like a relationship is somehow going to make up for it. You hope that having a man is going to compensate for the other parts of your life that might be falling apart.
However, when you know that you’re genuinely worthy of someone, then you are bringing a very positive and strong energy into the relationship. You assert your dominance and your place in a relationship with someone. That means that you are enticing other people to treat you the way that you should be treated. You know that you are worthy of love and so you demand the love that you are deserving of.
3. You need a man when you can’t survive without him. You want a man by choosing to be with him.
Love is a choice. And you shouldn’t believe anyone who says otherwise. Love would be too easy if it were something that would be beyond our control. No, it doesn’t work that way. Love is always something that you can control. You can always control how much love you’re willing to give a person.
You can always control how much effort you’re willing to put into a relationship. You can always control how much you’re willing to fight for a person. That’s what true love is. When you say that you NEED to be with someone to survive, that’s not love. That’s just codependence.
