I’m Falling in Love With Other People Falling in Love

I am an enthusiastic reader of romance novels. From my level of excitement about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement, one would think (wrongly) that I know them and will be attending the wedding, perhaps as matron of honor. I love a good love song. I consume romance at every turn. For other people, that is.

I’m not out here falling in love. I am falling in love with other people’s love stories. I can ship those relationships — even from my happily single status.

There’s something beautiful about watching a relationship begin. It’s not just the sparks — although they are beautiful to see. It’s knowing that even after enduring disappointing relationships and massive heartbreaks, there is hope of a love story that lasts.

Love stories give me hope.

Not hope that I’ll one day remarry (I’m not sure I want to) or that I’ll find a partner (I like my single life as it is). It’s just nice to see people making connections and being vulnerable. It’s especially good to see when we know those people have survived prior heartaches and come out the other side to love again.

I don’t feel any hint of jealousy. I don’t envy those relationships. It just makes me oddly content to see it — as if a romance I’m reading were to come to life before my eyes.

It doesn’t even matter if those relationships work out. Knowing that people are trying is beautiful to me. With all our faults and flaws, we just keep giving love and receiving it. Even when the relationships fail, we (hopefully) learn and try again.

Love doesn’t quit on us.

Sometimes, we quit on love. Or, like me, we go sit on the sidelines and watch with a drink in hand because we find it entertaining even if we have no intention of wading out into the fray. I haven’t quit anything. I’m just taking a nice long break from trying to turn an almost-good fit into forever. Or even from looking for forever to begin with.

I just want to be present in the life that I’m living, not consumed with my own relationship status. I haven’t given up on love. I see it everywhere. I’m just not interested in expending the effort to go hunt it down.

But so many people quit on love — even when they don’t quit on dating. They’ve decided that things are going to be a certain way, and they don’t try to make the necessary effort to heal, learn, or grow. They’re hoping to find partners who will put up with them, but they aren’t putting in the work to become good partners.

I know that I can be a good partner. I’ve done the work on healing my past trauma. I’ve improved my communication skills. I’ve given myself time to be alone without rushing from one relationship to the next. That’s not giving up.

But so many people just go from one relationship to the next without taking the necessary time in between to process. They leave behind a trail of broken hearts and broken promises because they just aren’t willing to learn from their experiences. They keep drawing the same wrong conclusion: that others are at fault for their poor relationship history.

But I know the truth. I am at fault in my relationship history. I made those choices. Maybe I didn’t have all the information. But when I did, I could have chosen better. Oftentimes, the information was there. I just didn’t want to see it. Healing necessitates some change, and I’ve made those changes. What I haven’t done is made other partners the collateral damage in my healing journey when I wasn’t actually ready for a relationship.

The point is that love endures.

Relationships don’t always last, but love just keeps going. It’s there for us when we’re ready for it. It’s so easy in some ways to fall in love, but so much harder to stay in it.

I loved someone with my whole heart at a time in my life when I was ready for that next-level relationship. It pains me to say that I kept loving him after he left — for quite some time. But the love didn’t get the memo that the relationship was over. It just … persisted. Despite my annoyance or resistance. Despite the disappointed hopes. It just … was.

Over time, I came to accept it. I stopped shaming myself for the feelings. I stopped seeing them as some kind of personal failing. I just let them be. And eventually, they faded as things will do when we’re not tending to them at regular intervals.

I fell in love again. This time, with the beautiful life I’d built on the ashes of one I’d hoped for. I fell in love with my friends and with their love stories. I sang love songs out loud in my car as if I was deep in the throes of an epic romance — even when I can’t remember the last time I went out on a date.

I stopped focusing on a partner. If I had one. If I didn’t. What might have been. I just turned my attention to my life. I started healing. I let myself breathe again.

I’m loving all the love stories.

With so much hate in the world, I find it inspiring to see love in any form. I don’t have a single negative thing to say about it, which is funny when I think of how many times I’ve been told that I’m somehow jaded or avoidant simply because I’m happy being single. I keep falling in love with people falling in love.

Maybe it’s because I remember what that’s like — when the touch of a hand could send an electric current through the entire body. I remember those early confidences and their fragile vulnerability. First kisses, first dances, first dates. First fights, first apologies, first hesitant moves forward. Growing intimacy. Full trust in another human being. Love.

Just … love.

Falling in it and being in it and feeling it.

So, I will cheer for celebrity romances — the Pamelas and Liams, the Taylors and Travises, the Selenas and Bennys. And I’ll cheer for my friends falling in love. I’ll sing all the love songs, and I’ll be happy for every single person who is happy in their relationship.

Maybe I’ll do it from the sidelines, drink in hand. But that doesn’t mean I’ve quit. It just means I know that I can cheer on everyone else, even when it’s not my turn to play the game.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.