Love

My life has been filled with love. I have been loved by my parents, my siblings, my friends and my boyfriends. From the time I was sixteen, every boyfriend I have had has told me he is in love with me. From the boys that last years to the boys that last a few months, I have never had a relationship in which the “L” work wasn’t spoken. On top of all that, in all my relationships, I have always had talks about moving in together, marriage, the future. There has never been a shortage of commitment in my life. But things like that make you wonder: If, in those moments, I can truly see myself standing at an alter with each of those men, then how can there be only one person meant for you in the entire world?

Granted, those relationships haven’t worked out obviously, but not because of them, because of me. I break it off ninety-nine percent of the time, I pull away, I stop making future plans with them. So how is it that I still maintain that there was actual love in those relationships?

I suppose that love I felt for each man in my life stems from the knowledge that each man that I dated was perfect for me at that moment in time; for that month, that year, etc. I loved them then, I could see myself with them-THEN. But as it goes, the only constant is change, so as I kept changing, I grew out of those men. The only problem with that theory is that each time I broke their hearts, it was almost always for the same reasons: I felt smothered, suffocated, taken advantage of, I had lost myself in the mix of things. So if I can’t be with a man who loves me so much that he wants to be with me every second of every day, and I can’t be with a man who is unaffectionate, and I can’t settle with a man who is in between those two extremes, then who can I be with? Or do I just have to keep changing, in order to find a happy medium of comfort and trust?

Maybe I shouldn’t be trying to blame the men I have dated. Maybe they had it right all along. Maybe I’m the one with the problem, the one who’s always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it doesn’t, I get bored. And when it does, I get heartbroken and scarred.

The only thing I know, is that the relationship I am in currently has helped my grow in ways I never thought possible. It has made me realize that I can’t blame other men for what one man did to me. It has stretched me and forced me to trust and believe. It has given me an outlook on relationships that everyone should share, which is this: If this relationship isn’t supposed to last, then so be it, but right now I am happy and content and in love. Some people never will experience being in love, but I have been blessed and loved more than my fair share. I now have to concentrate on continued growth and change for the better, because if I don’t, I may never be ready to settle down and all that love will, someday, be the distant memory of a lonely old woman.