You deserve to be chosen. You deserve the kind of love you do not have to beg for.

You deserve the kind of love you do not have to chase. The kind of love that chooses you just as confidently as you choose it. You don’t deserve to be loved by someone who has one foot out the door, or by someone who isn’t sure about you. Because at the end of the day — love should not hurt you more than it heals you, love should not make you question yourself or your worth. Love should be a safe place, it should not be the source of confusion and anger and sadness in your life. You deserve someone who is sure of you. You deserve that kind of beauty in your life.  

You deserve the kind of relationship that reminds you that love was always meant to be soft.

You truly deserve the kind of love that exists within ease. There is no doubt that you have to work hard at relationships, and try hard and show up through the mess and the growth that comes with life. But love should always be soft. It should not break you down. It should build you up. It should feel like an extension of yourself. It should feel tender and kind and hopeful. 

You deserve to feel seen.

Relationships in your life should not make you feel like you are hard to love. You deserve to feel understood. Your heart deserves to feel understood. You should not feel like you have to apologize for who you are. You are human and you’re trying your best. So is your partner. But at the end of the day, you should never have to feel ashamed of your anxiety, or the way you feel things very deeply. The right person will work to understand you, and work to understand that. Because you deserve the kind of love that does the work to understand how you need to be loved.

You deserve a love that is your best when you are not your best.

At the end of the day, life gets really difficult. You want to make sure you have someone who is going to show up for you. Someone who is going to hold your hand through the storms. Someone who is going to celebrate the wins.  It is as simple as that. 

You deserve to be loved the way you love others. And you deserve to believe that love exists.

Think about all of the ways you desire to love someone. The ways you want to take care of them and cherish them, the ways you wish to be their favourite thing. Think about the ways you’ve always been excited to make them soup when they’re sick, or squeeze their hand a little tighter when they are having a nightmare. Think about the ways you leap towards supporting the people you care for, the way you forgive them and grow with them and the ways you want to learn from them.

There are other people in this world that want to do that. There are others who desire to love you in these ways, there are those who want to know you and know how to love you and those who lay awake at night dreaming of the day they will find someone like you. 

But most importantly you deserve to be this person for yourself.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be whole on your own in order to be loved. You don’t have to wait until you are perfect to feel cared for and seen by another human being. Love isn’t perfect, it is real. You have to meet it where it is. 

However, when you do stand up for who you are, when you know yourself and what you deserve and what you want on a foundational level, when you don’t use love as a means of validation or attachment, you let it pass through you as it is. It becomes less about dependence or filling a void, it becomes less about letting it define you, and more about truly just being felt for what it truly is because you are not afraid of losing it. You know you will always have yourself. The pressure doesn’t exist anymore. And that is where the purest, most beautiful form of love thrives.