Being lonely doesn’t mean we are pathetic. It doesn’t mean we have no lives, or that we sulk and wallow in our own misery day in and day out. And it doesn’t mean we are lonely 100% of the time. It just means that we’ve stayed strong for too long.

We love our lives, don’t get me wrong. We love our friendships that have grown and matured over the past year. We adore our blooming careers where everything seems at the reach of our fingertips. We love our lives. And we love ourselves (finally).

But just because we love our lives, doesn’t mean we want to be single forever. And shocker, sometimes we get lonely and we feel small.

When we go to bars and we see a couple on a first date, we long for that mix of anxious and giddy feeling that overwhelms your body when you meet someone new. When we go to weddings, we stare in awe of the love that we see before us. And we want it too.

I don’t think there’s any shame in wanting that. In wanting love. In wanting to share your life with someone else. And I don’t think it makes us any less of a strong human being. 

The strongest women are the loneliest because we give so much of ourselves to others and sometimes forget our own selves. We get lonely because we care too much about other people and we don’t tend to ourselves.

We aren’t crying ourselves to sleep night after night. We aren’t chasing after people who don’t want us. But we know that we deserve love. We know that we deserve that magical feeling that finds a permanent place in our souls. We know that we will get one day.

But it’s so hard to wait. It’s so hard to sit back and watch others fall, while you’re staying stagnant.

It’s not that we aren’t trying. Believe me, we are trying. But this is the difference. We don’t settle for anybody just because we feel alone. We don’t go on date after date just because we are tired of feeling like this. We have confidence in ourselves that it will come to us. That one day, love will knock on our window and greet us at the front door. We have faith and we have hope. No matter how long it has been since love has blown our way.

We are lonely. But we don’t let our loneliness impact our everyday lives. We don’t let it interfere with our happiness. We make friends with the void and holes in our hearts, and keep on living. We keep on breathing. Because we know it’ll be worth the wait one day. And we know that we will find love someday. Someday.