I Don’t Want Unconditional Love Because It Hurts

Isn’t everyone looking for someone who they can love unconditionally? Someone who encompasses everything they’ve ever dreamed and hoped for? Someone who is the ying to your yang?

The idea of something being unconditional means that there are no conditions, it’s an open playing field. To love someone whatever the conditions, to totally put your life and wellbeing in their hands ultimately.

I love the idea of being in love, I am a true romantic and I have loved someone unconditionally, and so hard that I couldn’t imagine my life without them. They were everything I was searching for then they found me, and of course that set my inner romantic off.

I fell hard and I fell deep, it was pure, unadulterated, unconditional love. He was perfect, sure he had his moments, and for 360 days he did nothing to ever make me question his love. I had learned to open myself up to someone, show them my flaws and allow myself to believe that regardless of them, someone can love me. For 360 days, I was blissfully happy. I had found that unconditional love I had always craved.

Day 360. 9th December 2013. As I laid in our bed, unaware of where he was or who he was with, my boyfriend was cheating on me. He never actually told me. I found out, call it intuition but I found out through ways I’m not proud of. Even when we came home from a meal with friends, in floods of tears, screaming at him to tell me what he did, he never told me. He didn’t need to, he knew that I knew. I went missing, I don’t know how long for, an hour perhaps, and he never came to look for me. He sat in the bedroom of a house that I paid rent for and messaged his mates ‘Ooops, she found out!’ What I should have done was walked away, let him go and carry on with my life.

See, the thing with unconditional love is just that, it’s unconditional. I let him back into my life, back into our bed, and that’s when he knew he had won.

I became erratic, he knew that he had me where he wanted me. He’d talk to girls in clubs, tell me how hot they were and how he wished I could dress sexy like them but I wasn’t comfortable with my weight. I’d get upset when he’d disappear for ages and I’d find him with said girls and he would never introduce me in case I ‘got jealous and kicked off’. I’d turn into an emotional wreck, screaming and shouting through sobs of tears and he looked at me in disgust, threw every insecurity I had about my body back in my face, and did I know how easy it would be for him to pull another girl if he wanted to, and how I was mental.

Then it would stop.

He would stop. I would still be sobbing and he’d tell me that although it was all true, he still loved me and he chose to come home with me. I know now that I was in a mentally abusive relationship. I allowed myself to be divided down to the lowest I could be, allowed myself to be cheated on time and time again before he discarded me, moved on to someone else, start the ball rolling again.

But I loved him. Unconditionally. That romantic ideology became my ruin and I can’t forgive myself for being so stupid. I am well aware that not every man I meet will be a sociopath, but I struggle, I can’t let them in. I am madly in love with the idea of being in love, I’m good when I’m in love, but

I’m terrified that I will fall unconditionally in love with the wrong person again and I don’t know if I can rebuild myself again.

So call me a cynic, call me broken, dramatic or any other word you have, but I’ve had a taste of unconditional love, and it’s not for me. For me, to love someone unconditionally is to give them the power to break you.

Maybe one day, someone will walk into my life and prove me wrong, maybe they already have and I’m yet to realize it, but for now, you can keep your unconditional love, because I didn’t like the person it led me to become.