You meet someone, and you think that they’re the person you’re going to spend the rest of your life with, and grow old with, and hold hands for the rest of your days—and then, it all slips away.
Something happens that bursts that bubble and that dream, and you find yourself holding the broken pieces of another almost love.
Before you head into another relationship and another potential cycle of an almost love, perhaps you should take a step back and think about why it is you keep falling in love with almosts.
Maybe you keep falling in love with almosts because you’re not honest with yourself.
Perhaps your almost love told you that they never wanted a forever love. Maybe they said to you that monogamy was not for them and that they could never see themselves getting married, having kids, or living in that house with the white picket fence that you so beautifully painted. Maybe they were upfront and honest with you about all of that, and yet you didn’t listen. You didn’t take their words seriously. Perhaps you told yourself that they didn’t really mean it and that over time, you could convince them otherwise.
But you cannot convince someone to be someone that they are not.
You cannot persuade someone into cultivating a love that they do not want, either.
Maybe you keep falling in love with almosts because you’re settling for less than what you deserve and what you want.
Maybe you’re settling for a love that doesn’t call you in the evening because you don’t want to seem needy, when in truth, you’d like to hear their voice on the other end of the phone. Maybe you’re settling for a love that’s open and not monogamous because you’re afraid you’ll lose them if you say that you’d like it to be just the two of you. Maybe you’re falling in love with an almost because you still look in the mirror and couldn’t possibly understand why someone would fall in love with you back. You still have trouble seeing your beauty, and your worthiness, and all the tiny things that make you the marvelous human being that you are, so you end up shrinking yourself so that you take up less space.
But love is not supposed to make you feel small.
Love should expand you, not shrink you.
Maybe you keep falling in love with almosts because you’re in love with the idea of love, not the work that goes into it.
Forever love is the kind of partnership that lasts for decades upon decades. It’s the kind of love that inspires musicians to compose songs, and writers to pen novels, and painters to paint masterpieces.
Forever love is beautiful, but it absolutely takes work, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just lying or not being honest with themselves. Forever love takes work, but it’s work you want to do, and hope to do, and choose to do every single day. It’s not about molding another human into what you wish them to be or making sure they’re like some man or woman that you’ve read about in romance novels or romantic comedies.
Forever love is learning how to live together, messy bits and all.
Forever love is seeing the dark parts of someone’s soul and not trying to blind them with light—and there’s nothing almost about that.
