A letter from March 24th, 2021

Dear FutureMe, I hope someone proved you wrong. Are You In Love? Or Do You Just Love Them? You have a purpose, you are loveable, you will be happy. These are things we tell ourselves to feel like we're aren’t wasting our time. We need to feel whole, we need to feel safe, we need to feel loveable and believe that feeling. There is a difference between being in love with someone and loving someone. I love my friends, I love my family, but I’m not in love with them. We take what we can get because society has taught us to not be ok with ourselves, to pick ourselves apart, so when you find someone who will love you 30% when you only love yourself 20%, it feels like a miracle, but that’s not even half. As much as I want to believe that good things come from love, I have to face the facts, love is painful and love is a disease. I’ve seen first hand, love rip a person apart only to have them go back to the person who caused them so much pain because we’d rather have something than nothing. Something that nobody ever talks about is this, in a relationship, there will always be one person who likes the other more and that **** is painful. We are addicted to the idea of being in love but not the actual process of loving someone. It’s crazy how pressured we feel to be in a relationship at this point in our lives (16, 17, 18, etc), we are still forming personalities and we can not afford to be shaped by people who are also forming theirs, it’s detrimental to our health. We owe it to ourselves to at least try to build the foundation of our jigsaw puzzle before we try to fill in the center with other people's pieces that don’t even fit. Love is finite, it’s a concept and a feeling, but it doesn’t last forever. The divorce rate of 55% shows for something, and this is how it plays out, two people fall in love so they get married and it works for some amount of time until the spark dies. At this point, there are two people who are no longer in love, they just love each other. So you have a choice, do you stay together because you have so much history and you still care for each other but you are never fully happy? Or do you break it off because history isn’t enough? It’s a scary process because while there’s a chance that the grass is greener on the other side, there is just as good a chance that you could never recover, financially or mentally, and those odds are scary, it’s safer and easier to have something that's not worth it than nothing at all. I have to give credit where credit is due so I will say this. We do crazy things for love, we let it rule our lives blindly and we get our hearts broken. We go from person to person and we let it destroy us. If we are willing to do the things we do for love then there has to be something good about it, something that convinces us to keep putting our heart on the line. This is my theory as to why we do this to ourselves, we want to feel understood and loved unconditionally, we want to know that they could see the worst in us and love us anyways, we want to have someone you can tell everything too, and we want someone who will know and understand the pain we go through. Maybe this is a bitter take from someone who has never been in love and who has never been loved, even so, I’m not an exception to the rule. I have crushes, sometimes it feels like I go from one person to the next and never get a break but I also know that I have a crush on the person I fabricate in my head, not actually the person in front of me. It’s a dangerous game to play, to constantly want someone who will never want you back, but it’s easier to say I don’t have the capacity to love someone than to say I am unlovable and I know it for a fact. I understand why we do it, teenagers, adults, all of society, I just understand myself better. I’ve told you that the life that attracts me isn’t the life I want to be living and I meant it when I said it. I know that I have the ability to give every single piece of myself to someone else if it makes them happy. I don’t love this about me, I wish that I could change it but the fact of the matter is that I’ve never been living my life for myself, I’ve been living for all the people I love and so if, IF, I were to ever fall in love, I would live for that person until I was no longer alive. The worst part of all is that if I were asked out tomorrow I would say yes, because the possibility that I am wrong overpowers the amount of fear that I have for love. And god, do I wish that I am wrong.