The truth is, love can consume you. It can rework your entire being, carve into you, cause immense pain — and still somehow heal the most decrepit parts of you. Love is a tricky thing and if it isn’t held in check, you can lose yourself inside it without even noticing your autonomy slip away.
Whether platonic or romantic, love will inevitably hurt. Your heart may not break entirely, but it will fracture. Disappointment is part of the cost.
Still, taking the risk of loving — and allowing yourself to be loved — can reap the greatest rewards. In any life, it is better to love and experience pain than to live in fear of getting hurt. For those who wear their hearts on their sleeves, this will always be both a vice and a virtue — you cannot taste the sweetness of love without enduring its bitterness.
When Love Becomes Disorienting
Love is fickle. One moment it makes you feel untouchable; the next it leaves you lost, questioning your footing. Just when you think you have it figured out, love shifts, throwing another obstacle in your path and distorting your view of reality.
Sometimes, love is not enough to make things work. There is a difference between love and compatibility and they do not always go hand in hand. We fear loneliness. We fear hurting others. And so we stay — sometimes longer than we should — choosing familiarity over fulfillment.
Love clouds judgment. It alters our perceptions of what we want and what we need. It is not wrong to have needs and it is not wrong to recognize when a relationship is holding you back from them.
The Danger of Making Someone Else Your World
Love alone cannot sustain a relationship. While love and compatibility can coexist, they are not synonymous.
If there is one thing to learn from love, it is the importance of individuality and autonomy.
Far too many people lose themselves to the idea of someone else without recognizing the holes in their lives that must be filled with their own passions and self-fulfillment. Expecting one person to complete you deprives them of truly being seen — and deprives you of discovering how colorful and expansive your life could be.
When you place all of your happiness in the hands of another, you risk losing everything. But when you cultivate fulfillment within yourself — when you understand your purpose — no one can take that from you. Healthy relationships are built on coexistence, not codependence.
Foundations Matter
Understanding your passions and your drive is essential because no matter how deeply you love someone, they cannot ignite that fire for you. You must choose it.
Knowing yourself, understanding your needs and boundaries, challenging yourself to grow and learning how to love yourself. These are all components of a foundation built from within — one that, when paired with another strong foundation, can support something lasting.
Some people grow together. But sometimes you realize you fell in love before you ever had the chance to really find yourself. Despite all the care you pour into each other, the foundation beneath you is already crumbling.
Sometimes, you have to swallow the hard truth and accept that love alone cannot save something that was never structurally sound.
The Strength It Takes to Let Go
There is strength in changing your narrative, even when it means breaking your own heart. Realizing a relationship is unsustainable — feeling your creative spark dim, your independence fade, your connection to yourself weaken — it is terrifying.
You may come to understand that you cannot fulfill someone who has not yet discovered themselves. You may realize that you will never be what they need if you still want to pursue your passions.
Choosing yourself in these moments feels cruel, but it isn’t. Giving each other space to grow, instead of forcing a relationship built on incompatibility, is sometimes the most loving thing you can do.
The Anatomy of a Crush
They say a crush is just a lack of information. Your mind fills in the blanks, creating an idealized version of someone to fantasize over and to mourn when they don’t reciprocate your limerence.
But what is it when you fully see a person — flaws and all — and still hold them in a place of complete adoration? When you have dissected every piece of their personhood and yet their flaws only comfort you more?
A person with dreams and aspirations, yes — but also faults, vices and condemnations. They are flawed, but so are you and in that shared imperfection, you find something worth loving.
When Love is not Reciprocated
Yes, a crush is a lack of information, but what is it when you know a person entirely too well and it isn’t love (it can’t be) being in love would entail reciprocity. It requires being seen, not as a convenience, not as an option but as you truly are.
You pour your energy and affection into them, holding them in the highest regard. In return, all you get is just enough to keep you around and forget your self-worth, but never enough to be satiated. Never enough to know true intimacy.
Still, you stay, you smile, you wait, in hopes that one day they will finally see you.
They won’t.
The Moth Analogy
They won’t because they already have you — tucked neatly into their orbit, waiting until they need you.
Because they are the sun and you are a moth, endlessly drawn to the bright, pretty things in life that will inevitably end in your demise.
Your confusion will only grow because they know exactly what to do. They know the right words, the right gestures — just enough, never more.
They will cup your face in their hands. Kiss away your tears. Trace the lines of your palms. They will water your delusions with soft affection and whispered words that make your heart ache with yearning.
They do not want you. They want to feel like the sun — and you make them feel radiant.
You stay, digging your own grave, because you are a moth and you have flown far too close to the light, little one.
Every whisper of feigned affection. Every careless touch. Every kiss from lips that will never burn for you the way yours do for them pulls you deeper into longing that will never be satisfied.
You hold far too much love to waste on people who shine only because others burn for them.
One day, you will find love — one that is worthy and true. One that sees you fully and chooses you freely. You little moth, will find a new light to follow — one whose presence will not cause your demise.
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