Love Shouldn’t Be So Hard

Love shouldn’t feel like hard work. Relationships should not push you to your limit or make you feel as if you are drowning, treading water in a tsunami of questions, anguish, worry and that twisting, sickening feeling inside your stomach when you know something is off, something is not quite right.

Texts shouldn’t feel like getting blood from a stone, or constantly banging your head against a brick wall because you are forever giving parts of yourself to someone who never gives pieces back.

Your time apart should not feel completely different to when you are together. You should not leave their house in the morning and instantly feel your stomach tighten because you’re suddenly worried about who they’re talking to now, where they will go and who they will be with. You shouldn’t have to fret over noticing a change in their tone of voice when they call, or over-analyzing the lack of emojis and pet names in their texts.

You shouldn’t feel as if you don’t matter just because you are living out your lives away from each other, no matter if it’s a day, a week or a month.

Love should feel like flying, it should feel weightless and easy and natural. It should be someone constantly running alongside you, slipping their fingers between yours and forever cheering you on.

Love should be cups of tea as the sun begins its journey across the sky and those mundane conversations about work and family gatherings and who used the last of the milk, filtered so perfectly with being scooped up and kissed so suddenly it knocks the air from your lungs and being told you are beautiful when you feel like garbage.

It should not feel like a climb, like forever jumping over hurdles and never quite making it. It should not be pushing yourself, trying to perfect yourself so they will love you more or hiding something you enjoy for fear they will mock you. It should not be shoving your feelings down into a tiny box and kicking it so far out of sight, you begin to lose yourself.

It should not be smiling and saying you’re okay when inside you are screaming. It should not be sacrificing what is important to you or what you need out of the relationship, for an easy life. It should not feel like isolation, like you can’t depend on them when you feel lost, or sitting on top of a volcano of pent up anger, emotion and neglect because you don’t think your relationship could recover from the onslaught.

Love is meant to be the one thing which makes this world seem less scary and you less small.

Love is meant to lift you up, inspire you, and make you feel as if you can do anything. Love is meant to be the light when the rest of the universe seems so dark, so out of your control.

Love should never burden you, or punish you, or make you feel like a shell of the person you once were. Love should not feel like effort, like stressing over texts sent and read and not replied to. It should not feel like dates when you’re struggling to find the words to say or bedrooms cast in moonlight with only the silence stretched between you as you lay at opposite ends of the mattress. Love should not feel like a weight buried deep inside you or a constant unease which runs throughout your entire body.

Love needn’t feel like a battlefield, like shots fired and wounds so deep you will never heal.

Love should not be tearing each other apart, screaming words so poisonous they burn the tip of your tongue, and never being able to take them back.

Love should not be ultimatums, a scorecard or a competition. Love should not be jealous or unkind or malicious.

Love should be easy, should be like fireworks exploding inside your stomach, like those quiet Sunday mornings when the rest of the world is sleeping and the only thing that matters is how perfect your skin feels against theirs and how when you look into their eyes, it feels like coming home.

That’s what love should be, I hope you find it.