Love

I don’t think I’ve ever believed in love.

I’m not talking about familial or platonic love, I know that’s real. But romantic love? I don’t think it ever can be truly real.

I wanted to. I have yearned for it my entire life; someone that I can love with my whole being, my whole soul, and they love me the same. But every time I got close, I would push it away. I don’t know why. Maybe because my parents divorced when I was young. All I know is that as much as I love the idea of love, I was always incredibly scared of it.

Romance is my favourite genre, whether it was books, theatre, film or TV. If there was a good romance story, I was breathing it in. My favourite couples (in no particular order):

• Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark (The Hinger Games)

• Four and Tris (Divergent)

• Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy (Bridget Jones’s Diary)

• Meredith Grey and Derek Shepherd (Grey’s Anatomy)

• Spencer Hastings and Toby Cavanaugh (Pretty Little Liars)

• Emily Fields and Maya (Pretty Little Liars)

• Olive and Todd (Easy A)

• Alex and Mason (Wizards of Waverley Place)

• Beck and Jade (Victorius)

• Lucinda and Daniel (Fallen)

A great mix of healthy and unhealthy couples! But all of them passionate and captivating. I could never get enough. These were just my top ones! There were countless more.

Maybe that’s it though; I preferred my love in fictional form where it couldn’t directly hurt me. The love that I read about was dangerous and dramatic and defied all obstacles forced in its way. I guess it gave me very high expectations for what love could be and I never wanted to do the work to get to that point. In all of these stories the love was instantaneous – the troubles started after the couple was already fully formed and deeply in love with each other. I always looked for that, but real-life teenage boys were never the same as the fictional ones. I would start falling for friends, people that I never saw as attractive at first and then suddenly I would get a crush, because from that point I knew the love was already there, we’d already done the work without the feelings involved. Does that even make sense?

I even created my own separate world at night where I was in relationships with whoever I had a crush on at the time – celebrity or person I knew. In that world everything was easy and love wasn’t scary. It felt real.

Maybe I’m more scared of love ending than actually being in love. All I know is that I’m not entirely sure it can ever be real and true. In my experience, someone always gets hurt and I never want to be that someone. Life is already so complicated – why would I want to make it more so?

I’ve become very comfortable as a single person. Maybe it’s because I’ve never experienced anything else. I like sleeping in the middle of the bed. I like having all the space in my room to myself. I like not having to consider someone else when I want to do things. I like having the freedom to make my own plans and be my own person. Being with someone right now feels so out of reach to me and I question whether I’ll ever want that.

One day I want to get over it, and believe that love is real, that I can have the same kind of love I grew up watching and reading about. I probably will. Maybe.