The #1 Reason You Have Not Been in Love

Love is hard to come by.

But that isn’t why you haven’t been in love.

Finding “love” is incredibly rare, but it’s not that those of us who find love are amongst the blessed, chosen, or lucky few, but rather because:

So few of us actually have the ability to recognize it when it does happen to us.

We’re living in times of unlimited options. When you get to meet someone with a swipe on the screen, you are bound to run out of patience. So the moment you find a little flaw in someone, it’s just easier to pack your bags and leave instead of taking the time to understand their beauty and complexities beyond that flaw.

Love can only happen if you decide to stay.

And when it happens, you need to know it is happening because we have such a distorted view of love that we totally screw it up.

We assign expectations to love it never signed up for and can never hold on to. We drag baggage into relationships and unpack it slowly over the years, hurling the contents at each other with passive-aggressive barbs. We try to take perfectly formed human beings, with their own sets of likes and dislikes and try to customize them to tick all our boxes.

We don’t think we do this, but we do.

Movies and books make you believe that love is in codependence and in attachment, in sacrificing our own happiness or sense of self. That it is in making your partner in charge of your own emotional wellbeing and that the only way to express your love is in grandiose displays or carefully-measured markers like “marriage.”

But what they don’t tell you is that in real life it.is.just.so.much.better.

I swear to God this is true.

I have been euphoric just after a few hours with the right man. He didn’t declare his love for me in a thunderstorm or read sonnets to me in the moonlight. Instead for a few moments, I saw his pupils grow darker, with crinkles at the corners his eyes, laughter filling the room, and his arms falling around me.

And that was enough.

He didn’t really check all the boxes on my list but rather compelled me to rewrite it.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t post pictures of us on Instagram declaring his love for me, or that he didn’t kiss me when he said goodbye, because instead, he held my hand when I was nervous for a presentation, always reminded me to take my medicines on time, and stayed up at night with me when I had an assignment to finish.

Love is honoring one another as our own people, it’s a relaxed connection, and includes respect, lightheartedness, and calmness. It is loving each other even when we’re at our most hurt, most angry, or most anything.

Love is to never play the victim — or about how many hours they took to reply to your text. It’s taking responsibility for our own emotional wellbeing, and owning what’s ours and coming to each other with fairness.

Love is when words like “Did you eat lunch” replaces the I love yous.

It’s seeing a perfect person and loving them. And then realizing they are not perfect, and then loving them even more.