How We Slowly Forgot How To Love

When we were born, we weren’t born cynical. When we were growing up, we were not skeptical of love. When we were young, we loved fully, without the fear of loss and abandonment. We knew what love really was, and we let it take over our lives.

But as we grew older, things started to change. We continued to try to love, but somewhere along the line we got played, betrayed or let down. Our hearts that had never felt the pain started to get scared to care, because what if we get hurt again?

Someone broke our heart and we taught ourselves to forget to love.

Instead of keeping the faith and still believing in the magic of the world, we started to feel insecure. In the attempt to not get hurt again, we started to detach ourselves from feeling the warmth that once brought us so much joy.

Somehow in the struggle to not feel weak again, we started to define our strength by our inability to feel much. As we continued staying strong, we started to care less about other people’s feelings because we were such strangers to our own emotions.

Someone in our past played with our feelings, and we thought it was okay to forget to love.

We considered the ones who loved us weak, and some of us even got to the point of taking advantage of them. We justified our actions by telling ourselves that someone else had done that to us, so it was okay. We were slowly becoming what had initially changed us.

We started to have unrealistic expectations of “love”; we started to define love based on books and movies. We stopped focusing on real people, and continued our search for the person who would magically complete us, someone who we would meet when the time was right.

We heard that when we meet that person, we would just know, so we thought it was okay to treat people as disposable things. We started to look for a quick fix to find love, because putting time in this search seemed futile. We became selfish and we became inpatient. We forgot that we once had a heart.

Just because someone in the past broke us, we thought it was okay to break others too, when we should have realized how it really feels because we felt the same pain before.

We became jaded and forgot to love when we should have always remembered to care.

Love is not feeling strong emotions for someone within a weekend and feeling like you are flying. Love is not buying the most beautiful flowers and showering others with the most exquisite gifts.

Love takes work and love needs time.

Love is what happens when the initial phase of infatuation fades and you still accept each other knowing how different you are.

Love is knowing that it will not be easy, that you will have challenges, and sometimes you will want to give up but you never will, because you do not want to imagine life without your person.

Love is realizing you will be fine without this person in your life but knowing that is not the life you want.

Love is deciding that when you choose someone, you will wake up every morning and go to bed every night being grateful because this person inspires you to be a better person. They make every day worth all the struggles you had in life to get to where you are now.

Love is making the choice to choose to love this person every day. It is not too late to learn to love the way we are meant to.