When the Way You Love Is More Than They Can Give Back

The saddest thing is how normal this starts to feel

You can get so used to uncertainty that certainty starts feeling strange.

And why shouldn’t it be? You’re compromising your feelings. You are ignoring patterns.

Patterns?

You get used to waiting.

You get used to wondering every time something unkind happened.

You get used to checking.

You get used to analyzing every little thing.

You get used to someone being close one day and distant the next.

And because you’ve experienced the good moments, you keep convincing yourself that the bad ones are worth tolerating.

This shall too pass.

This shall too pass.

This phrase you recite daily with this tiny hope in your heart — they would come and you reconnect like you connected when you didn’t expect.

You even tell yourself:

“At least there are good days.”

But love, how many bad days are you willing to survive because of a few good ones?

Is your life not worth living? Or you ignored this life, your dreams to transform theirs?

And on what cost?

Your mental peace. Your well-being. Your soft heart. Your purest soul.

And what if patience stop being patience and become just waiting for someone every single day to finally become the person you want them to be?

Maybe that’s when you realize love starts becoming unfair.

Not just to them.

To you.

This love was never two-sided.

It was just you, who’s fixing the bond, the connection, and your entire imaginary “us.”

Maybe the problem isn’t love

I don’t think love is the villain.

See, when you love how happy you feel from inside. You hope. You imagine things out of your zone.

What I think is — sometimes we expect love to be returned simply because we feel it so deeply.

See you got hope again!

And my love, that’s where we get hurt.

You can love someone honestly.

You can care about them.

You can think about them all day.

You can miss talking to them.

Remember how you used to talk. This used to hits you very hard because you know from inside there won’t be any us now. Your brain accepted it but this heart, you know it’s not easy to convince your soft heart.

You can want to be close to them.

You can want their attention.

You can want them to choose you.

Now, let me tell you a bitter truth. None of that guarantees they will feel the same way :)

And that’s a horrible thing to accept.

Because when you love someone, somewhere in your head you start believing that your love should mean something to them.

You think:

“How can I care so much and they not feel it too?”

But my love, people don’t owe us the same feelings just because we gave them ours.

A feeling is something that come naturally, you can’t make people feel for you. Right?

You can’t make someone love you by loving them harder.

You can’t make someone choose you by becoming more understanding.

You can’t make someone stay by becoming a different version of yourself.

And you definitely can’t keep giving pieces of yourself hoping that one day they’ll look at everything you’ve given and finally say,

“Now I know how much you love me.

I’m genuinely sorry for ignoring all of this… This and that”

Maybe they already know.

Maybe they’re taking advantage of it.

Maybe they just don’t feel the same way.

And that hurts more than not knowing it.

I think we need to learn how to love without losing ourselves

Maybe that’s the real lesson.

But I wish it was that simple.

Because you simply can’t keep pouring love into someone when you’re the only one making the effort.

Sometimes you know they can’t give you everything you want, yet you still care about them.

You still want to talk to them.

You still want to see them.

You still miss the way things used to be.

You still crave that one hug that could last a little longer.

You still look at your favourite notification to pop up, just once again.

And you hate that you do it, because you know from inside you shouldn’t be waiting.

But you are.

And I don’ think that makes you weak.

It just means you haven’t stopped feeling.

As if it’s in your hands to detach just like that :(

The problem starts when you make their presence the condition for your happiness.

When their reply decides your mood.

When their silence makes you question yourself.

And somewhere along the way, you stop asking yourself what you want.

You are so busy thinking about what they want, why they’re distant, what they’re feeling and whether they’ll stay, that you forget to ask yourself whether you’re actually happy.

And maybe loving someone without losing yourself means — accepting something that is harsh to accept:

I can love you without expecting you to love me the same way.

I can understand that you have your own problems, your own fears, your own life. But you don’t have to understand mine.

I can care about what you’re going through. And you don’t have to care me back.

But I can’t keep making your confusion my confusion.

I can’t keep waiting for you to give me something that you may simply not have to give.

And I can’t keep calling it patience when I’m actually just waiting for you to change.

Maybe loving someone sometimes means letting them exactly who they are.

Because you can’t change them.

That’s who they are.

So maybe love doesn’t destroy you…

Maybe what destroys you is what you start doing to yourself because you love someone.

You start overthinking things that you never used to think about.

You start wondering why they didn’t text.

Why their reply was so short and rude.

Why they were warm yesterday and distant today.

Who they’re talking to.

Whether someone else is better than you entered in their life.

Whether they miss you the way you do.

Whether they even think about you at all.

And the worst part is, sometimes you know you’re overthinking. And more worse? You can’t help it. You brain, heart keep coming back to the same thing and you’re just stuck there — wondering, waiting, hoping.

You know you should put your phone down.

You know you should get on with your day.

But you still check.

You still hope.

You still wait.

Because knowing something in your head doesn’t automatically make your heart understand it.

And I think that’s the part of love nobody really prepares you for.

You can know that someone isn’t giving you what you need and still want them.

You can know that you should step back and still miss them.

You can know that they may never love you the way you love them and still wish they would.

There isn’t any situation arrived when you suddenly stop caring.

Sometimes you just slowly get tired.

Tired of waiting.

Tired of guessing.

Tired of trying to understand.

Tired of wondering where you stand.

And maybe that’s when you finally realize that loving someone doesn’t mean you have to keep dragging yourself in a pit where you feel always stuck and suffocated.

You don’t have to hate them.

You don’t have to call them a bad person.

You don’t even have to stop loving them immediately.

You just have to stop expecting a different version of them everyday.

Because maybe from their perspective they are giving you everything they think you deserve :)

And yes it’s not enough for you.

It makes it very painful.

Because sometimes the hardest truth is not “they don’t care about me.”

It’s:

Maybe they care about me. Maybe I care about them deeply. And maybe we still can’t give each other what the other person desires.

I think that’s what I’ve been trying to understand about love.

You can love someone and still not destined to be together.

You can miss someone and still choose not to chase them.

You can want them and still know that waiting for them is only hurting you.

And maybe choosing yourself doesn’t mean that your feelings suddenly disappear.

It simply means you stop making those feelings responsible for your life decisions.

Because I can love you.

I can miss you.

I can want you.

I can still remember how good it felt when things were easy between us.

I can still wish we could go back to the way we used to talk.

I can still want one more or maybe last hug, last conversation, one last good day with you.

And with everything in between, I can still choose myself.

Not because I stopped loving you.

But because I finally understood that I cannot keep abandoning myself just because you cannot love me back the way I need to be loved.