I let my emotions go. And a lot of the time, I was inconsolable. I was unbearable. And I felt even more and more ashamed.
Of course, I wasn’t completely caught off guard. At least I think I wasn’t. I had been hoping for love to walk into my life. It’s not like I didn’t ask for it. It’s not like I didn’t try my best to gain it. I was looking forward to love coming into my life.
And that was essentially the simplest aspect of this love game. The anticipation, even though I thought it to be incredibly difficult at the time, wasn’t necessarily so hard in retrospect. You think that waiting is the hardest part. You try to think about what you really want out of relationships and you hope that someday, all of your romantic dreams come true with that one special person. You daydream about the happy ending to the fairytale love story that you’re writing for yourself.
To add to that, I wasn’t completely naГЇve going into the relationships. I wasn’t the type of hopeless romantic who thought that everything was going to be simple. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that love wouldn’t be without its challenges. I wasn’t so immature to believe that love wasn’t going to bring difficulties along for the ride. In fact, I was a bit anxious in my pursuit of love. I knew just how quickly a person’s feelings could change and how drastic an effect someone’s emotions could have on a relationship. I’ve witnessed relationships of friends and family fall apart left and right. I know that just because two people love one another doesn’t mean that their relationship is going to be a successful one.
But let’s just say that love in theory is never going to turn out the same as love in reality. I never could have completely prepared myself for what was in store for me in reality. Love rocked my world and it rocked it in ways that I never could have imagined beforehand. And I had to roll with the punches. I had to adapt. I had to be flexible. If I didn’t adjust, then I knew that love would eventually elude me and I wasn’t prepared to lose a love that I hadn’t completely earned yet. But still, I was overwhelmed. I was embarrassed. I was ashamed. I was sad that something that I had asked for so frequently wasn’t something that I was necessarily prepared for. It almost broke me.
I let my fears get to me and I nearly imploded on myself. I became a person I had no plans on becoming. I became a person I never wanted to be. I let my sensitivities go on overdrive. I read too much into every situation. I blew things out of proportion. If his actions and his behavior didn’t meet my expectations, then I would totally freak out. I would lose it and that was wrong. I should have kept things under control. I should have been stronger.
I let my emotions go. And a lot of the time, I was inconsolable. I was unbearable. And I felt even more and more ashamed.
And from that difficult ordeal, this is what I learned: you can tell yourself that love is going to be difficult, but you’re never really going to be able to emotionally and mentally prepare yourself from what is going to come. You can want something with all of your heart but that doesn’t mean that you are going to have the emotional capacity to handle it once you get it. And that’s alright. That’s fine. It’s okay to feel overwhelmed sometimes. You are only human after all.
So don’t kid yourself into thinking that you need to feel 100% prepared for love before you choose to dive into it. It doesn’t work like that. If you refuse to budge on that policy, then you are never going to find love in your life. If you don’t adjust, then you are going to be lonely forever. Because there is absolutely nothing in the world that could prepare you for a genuine romantic experience other than actually experiencing it for yourself. So just take that dive. Take that plunge. Let yourself fall and just pray that you’ll be able to learn as you go.
Because at the end of the day, love is always going to be a leap of faith. And you need to have faith when you fall in love. You need to have faith in yourself; that you would be able to handle whatever trials will be thrown your way. You need to have faith in your partner; that they wouldn’t abandon you when things get difficult because they love you. And lastly, you need to have faith in love; that at the end of it all, despite how hard it may be, love is always going to be something that’s worth fighting for.
