How To Know If You Should Love Him Or Let Him Go

Promise me that you won’t let someone love you when every night you go to bed feeling like your heart is broken.

There’s a difference between being happy and being in love. There’s a difference between being with the guy you want and being with the guy you need. There’s a difference between loving someone because you’re lonely and loving someone because you’ve forgotten what lonely ever felt like.

Promise me that you’ll know the difference.

Sometimes you’ll get it wrong. You’ll keep needing another month, and another month, and another month to decide if you are dancing with the right man or if you just love the way your heart beats faster when he’s twirling you around. You’ll look into those eyes and you’ll smile, but you’re still waiting for that signal, that moment, when you find out that those are the eyes you’ll want to keep looking into every time you pull back from a kiss.

Promise me you won’t drag it on for too long.

Every second that you spend trying to make up your mind, he spends falling a little harder. Picturing you at his parent’s house for Christmas Eve and riding shotgun on the road trip he’s planning next spring. You’re trying to make it to tomorrow and he’s trying to make it to the next year when he can afford that engagement ring.

Promise me you’ll keep him on the same page.

You deserve a love that makes you feel brand-new. That makes you feel capable of just about anything. That makes you leave self-conscious behind and find reasons to laugh every single day. You deserve to never feel like you’re settling, even when the days, or months, or years of singleness seem to be dragging on, just so you have someone to buy you flowers on Valentine’s Day.

Promise me you’ll remember that even though you deserve those things, he deserves them too. Because while you’ve spent all this time being careful to not let your heart get broken, you need to realize that yours isn’t the only heart you’re holding anymore.

A heart is a big thing to hold in your hands. There isn’t room to juggle two for very long. You can either hold yours, or you can give it away to him. You can either hold his, or you can give it back.

But promise me—promise him—that you’ll let one go.

You’ll be happy, you’ll feel free, when you finally make your choice. You might not have him to post cute pictures with on Instagram, you might not have him to hold you when life gets hard. You might have to wait it out; watch months of singleness turn into a year, see friends and exes and cousins get engaged on Facebook, feel like you’ll never find the “him” that you were told would show up one day, the one that would make you feel ready to hold a new heart in your hands again. But then he’ll show up and you’ll know what it was you were missing in all those months of trying to make up your mind.

Or maybe you’ll choose to give your heart to him. You’ll finally be ready to dive in, not hold back, start looking past tomorrow to the next year, and the ones after that. You’ll realize that it was never him making your heart feel broken when you fell asleep at night, it was you all along. He was just waiting for you to be ready, and now when you dance you realize that even though feeling breathless can be fun, you’re happy that he’s still holding onto you when you catch your breath again.

There’s a person waiting for you to decide, right now.

Promise me you’ll make your choice.