Will I ever find love again? Yes, don’t stress.
Right now you think you’re never going to fall in love again. I know.
I know that it’s not because you’re skeptical – you see, you aren’t doubting your worth or selling yourself short. You know that you’re perfectly loveable – that someone else is going to take interest in you and want to be with you again someday. You know that.
It’s just that something’s missing inside you. You’ve forgotten how to love another person properly – how to give and receive affection freely, because your last relationship broke you.
I know you hate phrasing it that way. It sounds horrendously melodramatic to use the word ‘broken’ in reference to yourself – you’re still a person, after all – fully capable of living and loving and carrying on with your life. You never call in sick to work. You put your pants on one leg at a time in the morning. You’re a strong, productive member of society. It’s not as though you’re falling apart.
But something inside of you doesn’t fit quite the way it used to. You don’t feel butterflies so easily these days. You don’t grow weak at the touch of a hand. Being with other people feels empty – bleak where it used to be bursting. Dull where it used to be bright.
You’ve forgotten how to stay up late at night texting someone you’re interested in. How to spend hours getting ready for a date. You can go through the motions of intimacy – you’re still a human being, after all – but you’ve lost the ability to feel emotionally naked or exposed alongside someone new. The part of yourself that you were once able to give away so easily is absent and you just cannot figure out why. You wonder if it’s going to be absent forever.
I’m here to tell you that it’s not.
Of course I can’t say this with 100% confidence. I’m not a fortuneteller or a prophet. But what I am is a person who has been heartbroken. A person who’s been disenchanted with love. I’m a person who has been where you’ve been and felt what you’ve felt and made it through to the other side.
You aren’t ready for love because you can’t stop comparing current lovers to past ones. Because the spark, the magic, the fire that you’re aching to feel isn’t an organic emotion that you’re searching for – it’s an attempt to reconstruct the exact flame you once had with someone else.
You aren’t ready for love because the intimacy that you are aching for your heart to feel isn’t a genuine opening up – it is a desperate aching to be understood in the exact way you were once understood by someone else.
The emptiness, the flatness, the disenchantment that you’re haunted by right now is not a stark indication that your life will be absent of love forever. It’s only an indication that your heart is absent of the very specific form love you’re still aching to have. And that idea of love is precisely what you have to let die, before a new one can blossom.
Before love comes back, you have to rid yourself of your expectations of it. You have to let go of the particular mental mould you’ve forced it into. You have to stop waiting for love to arrive in the specific, pre-determined way you have planned for it to, before you will be ready to welcome the real thing in.
You’ll be surprised at who it happens with. You’ll be surprised about how it unfolds. You’ll be surprised that love feels nothing like the way you remember it and yet there it is – a new and completely different beast.
The reason love has not showed up for you yet is because you keep plugging the wrong numbers into a worn-out formula that stopped adding up long ago. You are searching for love in all the places you lost it and until you accept that it is not there, you’re going to keep coming up empty-handed. Because here’s the truth about where and when you’ll find love again:
You’ll find love once you’re happy without it.
You’ll find love when your heart and your spirit and your mind are so filled with passion for the world around you that you’re practically bursting at the seams. You’ll find love when your interactions with others are easy and calm and not desperately aching for the end of being cared for and admired. You’ll find love once you’re finally able to give it away, expecting absolutely nothing in return.
You’ll find love once you’re ready to show up to your life with your whole entire heart – every hour of every day.
And until then, it’s okay to take your time. It’s okay to do your healing. It’s okay to be lonely and tired and confused about when love is ever going to find its way back to your life.
Right now you may think that you’re never going to fall in love again. But there was a time when you thought you’d never fall out of it, either.
You were wrong then and you can be wrong again.
Except this time, being wrong is going to be unexpectedly and unequivocally beautiful.
THOUGHT CATALOG