Sometimes, We Fall In Love And We Get It Wrong

Sometimes we get lost.

Sometimes we put all our hopes and dreams into one person before we learn you should really keep some parts of your heart and soul for yourself. We all struggle with indecision, with insecurity. We’re all fighting the good fight, looking for that spark or connection in a world generally filled with indifference and negativity.  Often, we don’t know what we’re looking for, or how to find it. It’s hard to understand romantic love, if you’ve never truly felt it. It’s often hard to understand the difference between apathy and emotional investment. Separating lust and a true spiritual connection can be equally difficult and time consuming when we’re still trying to sort ourselves out.

Sometimes we fall in love and we get it wrong.

We fall in love with the idea of a person, of all the things we glimpse in small, rapid moments, and cling to those flashes with a desperation that can carry us on for years. Believing in and holding onto something that was never really there at all. We’re told love is hard, but the lines of ‘how hard should it be?’ are blurred and often undefined. Is he/she just shy? Are they merely struggling to find themselves? How long should I wait? Should I just let go? There isn’t one, decisive answer to any of these questions. No love is the same and no heartache can be matched. We all experience love in our own, often painful way.

Sometimes we don’t know when to let love go.

We stay because we’re driven by an emotion than can often prove stronger than fear or uncertainty -hope. Because maybe we have built up this idea of what we think love should be and we attach it to someone who seems to fit the ‘rules.’ We throw caution to the wind because that’s what you do, you put all the battered bits of your soul out there for another, often unsuspecting, person to review and judge. We forget that sometimes the things we want from people are not the same as the things we need. We might want praise and adulation, but we often need criticism and brutal reality.

Sometimes we are forced to realize that love can’t be enough.

Maybe the timing is wrong, maybe we’re not ready or open enough, maybe the world it’s self seems to be between us. Those are the ones that hurt the most. The ones that linger decades later, to be reviewed over a sunset with a steaming mug in hand and a quiet house we’ve built with someone else nestled comfortably behind us. They remain unanswered questions bitterly thrown out into the emptiness of the universe, never to be understood, never to find fruition. We just carry them with us, another piece of our hearts we no longer own.

Sometimes we learn.

We build ourselves through love. Through the euphoria, the quiet comfort, the arguments, the laugher and the pain.  We slowly come to terms with who we are and what we need as we grow from, and sometimes through, other people.

Sometimes we get it right.

Occasionally this can happen immediately, right off the bat. For many, it takes years of trial and error, of loneliness and perseverance. But eventually most of us find the perfect balance in ourselves. We find the ever-elusive understanding that love is not a red, heart shaped card once a year, or a grand, lavish ceremony, love is in the small moments. It is in the silence between two people, face-to-face, souls bared and vulnerable, where we find it. The meaning to ourselves, the reflection of all those things we were looking for that we never quite understood until that moment, when our breaths synch and our hearts tremble.

Love is every day. Love is a battle, a quest, a lifetime endeavor. Love is finding ourselves and then, miraculously finding someone else there waiting.

Sometimes I want to remember all the times I got it wrong.

Reminisce about the good times, and recall the bad. I want to appreciate the lessons learned, the truths discovered and the bridges built and burned.

Sometimes I want to remember all the times I got it wrong so I can understand why I finally got it right.