Love is the one thing we seek in life. We search for it throughout our lives, sometimes never finding it. Or at least that’s what we think. Sometimes we find it and along the way that love turns into pain and anger, which causes us to close our hearts off and to shut out everyone and everything that tries to show us love. It is unfortunate how we allow one person to dictate for the rest of our lives how we love ourselves and who gets to love us. For the longest time, I allowed one man to define that for me. I had made peace with the fact that I would never get to know the feeling of being in love with another human being. To say the least, I got to a point in my life where I can say I was content. 

 

       Content I say… who the hell am I kidding?! I was only saying that because it was easier to admit that than to admit the truth to myself. 

 

The truth was that I couldn’t handle getting hurt again. It was easier to push love away than to seek it, yet I question if that was love at all or was it actually me being controlled? Love is being able to be yourself and not to constantly feel suffocated by the one person who said they love you. That’s not love. Unconditional love is accepting that person for who they are and all that they are, and not feeling the need to change them. They will be perfectly imperfect in your eyes. You will grow together, not apart. Unconditional love is only beautiful when we are not being shamed or put down, but rather when we are being accepted for who we are as a person. 

 

That was not the case for me in my relationship. At seventeen I was young and naive. I truly thought that if I changed and became the perfect wife my husband wanted, he would love me. The only problem was that he didn’t love me. Oh, well, he did in his own way. I was incapable of loving him because I was changing to fit someone else’s mold and not mine. When I wasn’t able to show him who I was, who I truly am, how could I have loved him? I wasn’t being authentic to myself. Loving him was a losing game and it was only a matter of time before it all crumbled down. It did! It all crumbled down after almost ten years of being married to each other. 

 

 I walked away. I walked away thinking I was unable to love. Years later, I came to  realize that  it is a lonely world to be in and a limiting thought to believe. 

 

It took me years to understand; it isn’t that I am incapable of loving someone. We are all able to love and be loved when we are not being controlled in a relationship. For years after my separation from my husband I would push men away the second I knew they were in LOVE with me because I had told myself that I couldn’t love, that I was incapable of LOVING them back. My heart was broken to the point that I gave up on love, even though love is the one thing we all seek in life. I can for the first time admit that it was shattered, shattered beyond repair. I created rules to allow myself to date. These rules kept me from getting emotionally attached to any man I would date. They kept me from getting hurt. At least that’s what I had convinced myself.