The thing about falling in love

“I don’t want anything else.”

The thing about falling in love is how amazing and debilitating it is. I’ve fallen in love twice in my almost 27 years of life. And it’s terrifying. It’s an all-encompassing and beautiful experience with someone who finally gets you. But like with life, there’s always a catch. In order to fall in love, you need to reveal yourself. Break down all that armor, throw away the self-deprecated jokes and be vulnerable. I’ve never been good with vulnerability. Well, maybe in my writing but when it comes to my real life, I find it hard to drop the wall I built up. You get to put it down long enough by the people you love, and it becomes the only way to survive. When you show yourself, will they still love you? And how long will this last?

I believed for a long time that whenever I was happy, it wouldn’t last. Maybe I manifested it myself or was self-sabotaged, but I felt that any good, happy memory will be washed away by some awful event that happens months later. My first love crashed and burned after a month or so. I lost friendships through that. It put extreme stress on my already mounting trust issues and made me question my love for that person. Falling in love is always a risk.

Can you trust this person with your heart?

Do I deserve this kind of love in my life?

Because when you come with massive trust issues, you develop self-doubt. Maybe all these people leave because I’m a bad person. I’m not a bad person, but your brain will conjure up these anxious thoughts and it’s hard to dismantle them. So when you have this person who confesses their love for you, despite all your flaws and all your insecurities, your brain doesn’t know how to handle it. You question the motive of such a confession, but it’s real. This person loves you despite all of that. They love every part of you.

For me, that has been hard. To have love with no strings attached, no selfishness, and just intimacy, is strange. I have someone that will always be there for me. My partner to the end. Why? How?

Because I love you. My anxieties were quelled by a single sentence. For an anxious person like me, being in a loving relationship has been easy and hard at the same time. I search for the storm that never comes and sometimes that can overwhelm me. Overall, love has been a tricky thing for me. To have someone that is your person has been amazing and weird. I found I was better off alone and I worked on myself. I built up my standards and knew what I wanted. I never expected him to come along. It has been very fulfilling. Love has its perks, but with my brain, it can have its downsides. I guess my reason for this post was that it’s okay to have these moments of doubt. You can’t just switch these emotions or these survival techniques you built up over years off. In moments I self-sabotage, my partner comforts me and reminds me he isn’t going anywhere. Other people who have self-doubt and don’t think they deserve love, trust me you do. Even after being in a relationship for almost two years, I still have doubts. But I always know that I have someone I can come home to when things get dark.

Another rambly post, I apologize. But I hope you enjoyed it and I shall see ye in the next one.