The Truth About Love In Your Twenties

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@LPKPHOTO

Your Early Twenties

You think love is like a movie or a fairy tale, you’re all about changing the bad boy or girl, believing in grand gestures to express your love or running away with the one you love. You think that love is enough and it has the power to overcome any challenges so you don’t really think of heartbreak as a consequence. You jump into any relationship with both feet because you don’t think about tomorrow, you’re infatuated and maybe already in love with someone you just met and your heart is still intact. It’s bruised but not entirely broken.

Your heart can still afford a few more heart breaks so you approach all relationships with freedom, with fearlessness, with optimism and you approach it with the mentality that young love is the best, young love is all you’ve got and young love is the only real love that still exists.

Your Mid-Twenties

After a few heart breaks from your early twenties, you enter your mid-twenties with caution, you still have time for fun and games and maybe flings but you wish for a real relationship. You no longer depend on only love to get you through, you start looking for other important qualities too; like responsibility, honesty, loyalty and you look for people who you can see a future with.

You may not be over one of your exes or you may be waiting for the one that got away to come back, so you never really give yourself to anyone like you did with your ex because you still think that a part of you will always belong to them, that it’s easier to get back to that person because they already know everything and you’ve already given them all your heart.

So you’re in limbo. Part of you wants to move on but the other hopeless romantic part wants to wait for the moment your ex comes back — the moment the love of your life finds their way back to you and stays.

The moment you’re truly waiting for before you decide to completely move on with someone else.

Your Late Twenties

You live in contradiction; because you know better and you try to choose wisely but then you long for the younger you, you long for your uninhibited heart that didn’t think too much before giving someone a chance, you long for the days when you believed in love more than heartbreak, you long for the nights when you didn’t even have to worry about not being the only one because people were loyal.

Now you’re hurt and you’re trying to look for someone who won’t hurt you, someone who will treat you better, someone who will stay and fight instead of giving up or leaving and someone who actually loves you instead of pretending for a little while before they take off.

Now you’re scared — scared of making another wrong decision, scared of continuing the path you started in your early twenties of falling for people who are wrong for you thinking you’ll change them. You’re scared of acting like you did in your mid-twenties going back or waiting for people who proved, on more than one occasion, that they don’t want to be a constant in your life.

You’re scared as you approach your thirties that you won’t be able to find the love that you’ve spent the past 10 years searching for, you’re scared you might not meet the one, you’re scared that maybe you’re just meant to be single and focus on your career.

Now, you’re scared because no matter how you feel about someone, you’ll notice the red flags, you’ll stop making excuses, you’ll stop selling yourself short and you’ll stop giving someone a chance to break your heart again.

* * *

So you’re stuck, not knowing if you should just give up on love or wait for it to come to you as you try to live your life and fight the loneliness you feel inside.

But you’ll never be able to get rid of the hopeless romantic of your early twenties or the dreamer of your mid-twenties or give up the wisdom you have now.

Part of you will always try, it will always dream, it will always forgive, it will always wait a little longer because no matter how many times you say you’re ready to give up on love, you can’t really live without it and you can’t get rid of it because it’s always been a part of you. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Writing makes me feel alive. Words heal me.

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