Love Is Not Destructive, But People Are
By Rania Naim
Love is not mean. People are when they say they love you and then hurt you. When they make you feel special and then drop you like you meant nothing. When they find a way to unlock your heart and then lose the key. People are mean when they treat love as a game of numbers, as a game of who cares less, as a game of how many hearts they could break before they get their heart broken and a game of how many people can chase them so they can feel wanted, validated, loved and get away with anything they want.
Love is not frustrating. But modern dating is; the fact that you don’t know where you stand, you don’t know how many people the person you like is talking to, you don’t even know if the person you like likes you back or if they just want your attention.
Love is not manipulative, but people are. When they want to keep you so they give you just enough to make you hope for more but they don’t promise anything so you don’t hold it against them. When they act selfishly one night because they were lonely or drunk or heartbroken and then change their minds in the morning. When they make you believe that they’ll stay, that they could be different but then they leave and become like everyone else.
Love is hard. But it’s not destructive. It doesn’t bruise you the way people do. It doesn’t belittle what you do or who you are. It’s not out to get you. It’s not intentionally breaking your heart. But the people you love could destroy you simply because they don’t know how to love or because they’ve never been loved. Sometimes people don’t know what love is and they keep trying on people’s hearts and end up breaking them. But real love is not destructive even if it’s hard. Real love is healing, it’s supposed to tame you and it’s supposed to make you stronger.
Love is magic. But people keep making excuses and finding reasons to run away from it. People let their work or their busy schedules stand in the way of love. They find ways to make it stop. They find barriers to make it not work. They put rules, limitations and deadlines. They use logic. They use numbers and statistics for emotions and feelings and then they wonder why it never makes sense.
Love is ethereal. Love is divine. Love is marvelous.
But people always find a way to ruin beautiful things or break hearts and associate it with love. People who don’t know how to love should leave the hearts that can’t live without it alone, the hearts that are yearning for it, the hearts that think that love is the reason we’re all here and the reason why we’re alive.