It’s Not Hard To Fall In Love, It’s Hard To Keep It

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The easy part is feeling butterflies. It’s being so extremely nervous every time you’re about to see them. It’s looking at your phone waiting for them to text you that they’re outside, making two minutes feel like two hours. It’s getting that text and looking at yourself in the mirror before you walk out the door to make sure your skirt isn’t tucked into your underwear. It’s walking down the stairs to meet them and tripping over your own two feet because you’re so incredibly skittish that you don’t even have control over your own body.

The easy part is feeling absolutely wonderful when you’re with them. It’s seeing their face and having it instantly light up yours. It’s sitting across from them in a restaurant and talking so much that you forget to eat. It’s smiling and laughing your way through the entire dinner.

The easy part is walking home together and holding hands. It’s wondering whether or not they’re going to kiss you, and hoping that they do.

The easy part is falling. The easy part is the beginning, when everything’s silly and light, new and exciting. The easy part is when the overwhelming joy of love overcomes the fear of it. It’s easy to fall in love, but how do you keep it?

How do you fight that terrifying feeling that you’re going to mess it all up? How do you enjoy the feeling of falling when you’re simultaneously worrying about whether or not this will all end, that this incredible thing you’re experiencing won’t last?

And even when it does sustain, even when it lasts longer than you thought it ever would, how do you maintain it? How do you keep love alive when you’re blindly running through it?

Because after you’ve fallen, after the easy part is over, the hard part is convincing someone to stay. How do you show them only the parts of you that are worth loving? How do you hide the parts that aren’t?

The answer is you don’t. You don’t convince. You don’t persuade. You don’t hide. There’s no convincing needed in real love, and there’s no need to hide either. You don’t convince someone to love you, they just do or they don’t.

And this is where you wonder what happens when they don’t?

The answer is you let them go. Because if you try to convince someone that you’re worth loving, it says that maybe you don’t believe it yourself.

Someone who really loves you will choose to stay, they won’t need convincing. And yes, that’s the hard part. That’s the part where heartbreak sometimes happens. Because you invest all this time into falling in love, and then once the falling is over, you realize maybe you’re not right for each other.

It’s hard to find the person who stays after you’ve already fallen, the person who makes you feel like you’re falling forever. And I know you think it’s nearly impossible to have that, and maybe it is. But you shouldn’t have to fight to keep love around. You shouldn’t try desperately to keep a love that isn’t meant for you simply because you’re afraid to be alone.

It’s hard to keep love, it’s hard to make it last and keep it healthy and growing, but not all love is meant to be kept. Some is meant to be let go.

And you can’t let the fear of heartbreak hold you back either. You can’t push love away because you don’t know how to sustain it. We’re all a little clueless when it comes to love. We’re all kind of just figuring it out along the way, and if it doesn’t work out, it wasn’t a waste.

Yes, your heart might break, but heartbreak teaches us a lot about the person we were with that we couldn’t realize when we were with them, and it teaches us even more about ourselves. 

Keeping love is hard, but just try to enjoy everything it brings into your life while it’s around.