Do you truly love them?
Or do you the love the comfort you feel knowing you’re not alone?
It happens to everyone at some point in life. You wake up one morning, look at the person next to you intimately sharing your space, and you realize something powerful …..
They’re not the person you want to spend your life with anymore.
They’ve become a part of a routine that you’ve grown so accustomed to. The sound of their voice, the scent of their skin, their physical presence day in and day out. All of it has become as natural to you as brushing your teeth in the morning.
But their pieces just don’t fit into your puzzle anymore. Recognizing that is the part that comes easy, but it’s the thought of them no longer existing in your world that frightens you.
It's normal.
People grow; unfortunately not always at the same pace. So you travel down this path together, trying so desperately to stay on the same route.
Life does it’s part to tug you both in different directions. You find yourself excited to learn about new things, wanting to travel to different places, desiring to explore life in ways you haven’t before …
Only to be held back by someone content with standing still. Someone who wakes up every day, does the same thing over and over, and calls it a life.
It frustrates you.
You find yourself holding on to who they once were and the memories of yesterday. The moment you met. Your first date. The first time you both made love. Never stopping to realizing that people change. As does their pursuit of you, and the effort they put into your happiness.
You want more. But the road to that proves to be the more difficult one to travel on.
So we invest so much of our time and hearts into people who knowingly will never catch up to us, into the memories of who they once were and how they once made us feel, or even to the circumstances we are bound to. Often becoming prisoners to our own life, wondering about the “what if’s” and a love we truly desire.
We become a servant to love, not a beneficiary.
And one day we wake up so far removed from where we began. Spending so much time and effort giving someone our love, in hopes it changes who they are and how they treat us.
Only to realize we've lost ourselves in the process.
Love was never designed to be that way.
Romantic dinner dates at your favorite restaurant. Holding hands through Central Park. Vacations to the most beautiful islands.
And a post on Instagram for the world to see it all.
That’s not love. It’s the mask we use to fool people and ourselves that it exists in our lives.
Love is caring, it's nurturing, it's protecting. It's looking at someone and knowing you found a partner who makes you a betterperson. Someone who uplifts you, challenges you, and pushes you in the right direction.
Someone who gives you back the love you so selflessly give away.
Instead we create distractions to our reality. We put filters on our life in the same exact manner that we put filters on our photos. To disguise the imperfections so that the world perceives it as beautiful.
So that we find peace in their validity.
At some point though, even the distractions can’t disguise the pain in our eyes that seeps deep into our soul.
But we stay. Because we fear.
And somehow, we call that love.