Here’s What I’ll Tell You Instead Of ‘It Will Happen When You Least Expect It To’

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I’ll tell you that you are not hard to love.

Even if you’ve loved people who made you feel this way or people who couldn’t stay with you when you were at your lowest. Even if you couldn’t make a relationship work or you’ve been single forever, you are not hard to love, you just haven’t met the person who is willing to love you. The person who won’t give you such a hard time for being yourself and the person who will look at everything you hate about yourself and somehow love it.

I’ll tell you that you don’t have to settle.

Because of your age, because you’re lonely or because you just don’t know if you’ll ever find what you’re looking for. You don’t have to be with someone who doesn’t treat you right or someone who only wants to be with you when it’s convenient for them. You don’t have to settle for someone who is unsure about you or someone who doesn’t want to be in a relationship with you. Settling will only make things worse and will make you slowly lose yourself. Settling will blind you from finding the one who could give you what you need.

I’ll tell you that it takes time.

Good things take time. Real things take time. Love takes time. It’s not easy to find something so beautiful and so real. It’s not easy to find genuine people who want to see you happy and only want what’s best for you and it’s not easy to find forever — in a world obsessed with what’s easy and temporary — it’s hard to find something solid and something that lasts. Only a few lucky ones find the love of their life young, others just have to keep searching and waiting.

I’ll tell you that it’s not you.

And even if it is, that’s how you learn, that’s how you know, that’s how you make better and wiser decisions and that’s what heartbreak teaches you. It teaches you what you need to change about yourself to be a better partner and what kind of person you need to avoid being with. It teaches you how to be strong and whole on your own until you find someone that makes your life a little easier and it teaches you that no matter how many times you get your heart broken, it’s not the end of the world. You’ll find someone better, you’ll fall in love again, you’ll get over people, you’ll learn how to move on and you’ll learn how to survive.

I’ll tell you that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself or on your heart because one day, it will all make sense. One day, you’ll find your person and you’ll be happy whether you expected it or not, it will just happen. 

Rania Naim is a poet and author of the new book All The Words I Should Have Said, available here.