What It Feels Like To Stop Believing In Love

Some of us spend all our lives searching for it — that warm feeling of security, comfort and knowing that there is someone out there rooting for us — what we call “love”.

We look for it in various chapters of our lives, in the people we meet along the way. The search never ends.

Romance novels and fairy tales paint a picture and describe to us how perfect it will be — how we’ll meet this one person and everything will fall into place.

They place this beautiful illusion in our head. This illusion we carry with us throughout our journey of life. We hold dearly onto the believe that there is someone out there for us, that true love does exists, the type of love that is magical and enchanting, complicated yet simple.

So out into the world we go, embracing whatever lies ahead with open arms, ready to love fiercely and to in turn receive the love we’ve dreamt about. We go out with new people, strike conversations with strangers, hit someone up on social media. We search for it, even in hopeless places.

But somewhere along the line we start to realize things are not turning out how we’ve expected.

Dates come up to nothing. We recieve one rejection after another, people lead us on for the fun of it, and we continuously have our hearts broken by those who are just in it for the thrill.

We tell our friends and the people around us of the imaginations and visions we have of love and they tell us we’re too easy and vulnerable, thus unfavorable. That we are doing it wrong. That in this day and age we have to play that “push and pull” game to keep things on the edge, so the other party would be kept interested. But we can never understand that, for we’ve always believed in giving it our all.

It leaves us confused, lost.

And we start to question whether the love we’ve always believed in is truly real or if it was just a complete lie that we were gullible enough to believe.

Something that was made up in our head and could never happen in reality.

Insecurities develop in the process and we wonder whether the problem lies within us, maybe something somewhere is wrong with us. Maybe if we were a little more attractive, a little more charming or funnier, someone might have chosen us as their other half. But sadly, not today.

It’s an accumulative thing — each heartbreak gets worse and worse, to the point where we no longer feel the pain. It’s as though we’ve mentally prepared for it and expected it to happen, so it doesn’t disturb us anymore. That’s when we realized we’ve reached the end zone, the end of the line where every bit of hope we’ve ever held on to has left us.

So, we give it all up, everything about it we’ve ever believed in.

And we whisper to ourselves, “Maybe someday someone will come along and show me that love does indeed exists, but for now, I have stopped believing in love.”