These are the simplest facts of love.
Love is not supposed to hurt you more than it heals you. The right person makes the timing right. Indecision is a decision, and that decision is no.
Love is not hard. Attachment is hard, and grief is hard, and expectations are hard. Unconscious fears are hard, and old traumas are hard.
Losing a sense of security is hard. Exiting your comfort zone is hard. Facing the world alone when you thought you’d have someone to rely on is hard. Realizing you’re lost and a relationship would make you found is hard. Having the one potential version of your future you were most invested in fall through is hard.
But love is not hard.
What’s hard is all the other junk that love can often yolk up — all that it leaves us with, all that it masks, and then all that it reveals.
Love doesn’t debate whether you should be together. Love doesn’t leave you to look for signs that you should return. Love doesn’t make you question whether you are worth someone’s time. Love doesn’t leave you doubting your interests and your quirks and the little nuances that make you who you are. Love doesn’t make you feel as though you have to compete with someone else for it. Love doesn’t make you prove your goodness before you can receive it.
Love is a present thing, not an abstraction. It’s not something we have to wonder about, or calculate. Those we love exist within our lives in real time. Love is when presence meets passion. Love is when you just simply are — not in theory, not at some future date, not in promises, not in words — but in every simple moment of every ordinary day.
Love is a healing force.
Love is learning someone inside and out.
This is what your soulmate will do.
Instead of criticizing, they will help soften your judgments. Instead of looking down on you, they will help you look more positively at yourself. Instead of trying to fix you, they will walk with you as you fix yourself. They will figure out what you like and need and do your best to show you kindness and gratitude and effort each day. Not because you ask them to, not because you are supposed to, but because that is what it is to coexist with someone you deeply care about.
Broken love is not something you must endure in order to earn something better.
Love is so much deeper and so much greater than just starry eyes and racing hearts. It’s two lives being woven together before either of you really knows what’s happening. It’s an obvious thing. You know when you are in love. You know when you are supposed to be with someone.
It doesn’t require an abundance of conscious thought — it’s a plain fact of your life, evident for all to see.
This is what you’re holding out for.
This is what you’re waiting on.
It exists, and you know that it exists, which is why it is so painful when someone who seems like they would be so right for you just simply doesn’t work out the way it could.
But what seems right on the surface matters little, because love is what happens just beneath. It’s an unconscious response to one another, a bonding, a forming of an entirely new life together.
One day, you will understand that your soulmate is your lifelong teacher, healer, and partner. They are the person with whom you will do every mundane thing for the rest of your life. They are the person who will be at every holiday and every vacation, they are there to celebrate every win and soothe you through every loss.
And before you arrive there, you’ll meet a series of other loves, ones that teach you greater lessons, and show you deeper truths, and help you confront your darkest corners — and then let you go.
The truth is that the love we are meant for is the love that turns us more into the people we are meant to be, whether that’s through loving or losing them.
If you are in a relationship that hurts you more than it helps, then it’s time to turn around.
Your soulmate is someone who helps heal you.
Not someone you need healing from.