Your right kind of love is you!

Lately, a lot of people I know, have gone through bad break-ups, failed relationships or just gruesome rejects. I really don’t know why I am an Agony Aunt to so many in-love people when I cannot recollect the last time I was “in love” myself. Nevertheless, I try to listen fairly well, empathize perfectly and sugar-coat the harsh reality good enough before delivering it to them.

Yes. I know. I understand. Having a relationship, somebody to rely on, and somebody who cares for you; is beautiful and wonderful. It gives you strength and power. But before you look for love in that somebody, don’t you think, you have to fully fall in love with yourself?

Yes. You! Have you really accomplished that?

I know you haven’t.

I blame two things for our generations’ misery in terms of their love lives. One, the unrealistic romantic movies where every person has a void and they fill it up after finding a significant other. Why is void always supposed to be there? Can’t people be complete enough to qualify for love? Two, the invisible pressure among people, right from teenage years, to have a relationship or a date or a one-sided love or atleast a crush! Like why can’t people be by themselves?

I say this because I have experienced it. I was, with traces still present, a so-over-obsessively-romantic-that-it-kills kinda girl. Since childhood! I loved seeing Richard Gere do beautiful things for Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. I loved when Monica proposed to Chandler. I adored when John Cusack still believed in Serendipity. And I grew up admiring Shah Rukh Khan swaying his arms and making countless actresses fall in love with his charm. As clichéd as it sounds, I actually did.

But it is with experience and maturity that I realized that these movies are dreamy, impracticable and light-years away from an iota of reality. Real relationships need work. It needs identifying every cell of your soul, evaluating if you can align with the other and it can fit with yours, and dealing with every obstacle with the stubbornness to make it work. But we are so infatuated with the beauty and the attention and the pumping hormones, that we don’t see. We don’t realize that it is not going to work. It was never going to.

Recently, a friend of mine broke up with her boyfriend of two years, someone she met via Tinder, because he was cheating on her. She was so devastated that she called me frantically for five nights straight. She is a little better now. When I spoke to her, I comprehended that it wasn’t the break-up that shattered her. It was the fact that she had invested so much of her time and priorities in that relationship that made it difficult for her to just move on. And this has been her issue ever since she parted ways with her first beau at the age of sixteen.

Agreed, there are successful relations of people who commenced dating at that age. But how much did you know of yourself at that age? I surely didn’t know even 10% of myself. Okay, I am a proven complex and unpredictable human being, but still, isn’t teenage too young an age to deduce what you really want? Aren’t you a little too immature at that age to decide? And this just continues. The pressure to be with somebody. The force to be in a relationship.

I read this line in a book- “We accept the love we think we deserve.”

And how precise it is! Many of us have genuinely not discovered and recognized what kind of love we really deserve. We just have this blurred vision of it and we think it is right.

Ask yourself this question. Think. Really think. Consider every aspect. The person who you are fussing over, was it the real thing? Was it meant to be forever? If it was anything less than that, then, relax guys. Losing out on love is not the end of the world, even if it looks like it. The most important and vital relationship you will ever have, in the whole universe, is the one with yourself. Yes.

Everybody in this world has low self-esteem issues. That is just a fact. But you don’t need anybody else to make it better for you. You don’t need somebody else to validate you. You, yes, you, need to have an unconditional love for yourself. You need to be able to look up and tell yourself, after every blunder, that you are going to be okay.

Cry if you must, break down a little bit, but don’t torture yourself. Get up, look at yourself in the mirror and just say, “It is going to be okay.” I know it is hard. But before you fall in love with anyone, you need to be complete on your own. You need to able to forgive yourself, after you have fucked up. You need to be fine on your own, after being mad at yourself. You should be able to stand up on your own feet, after falling. You have to be proud and unapologetic of who you are as a person. You have to accept and love all your flaws and idiosyncrasies. You need to do it.

You need to love yourself more than anyone can. Because, no matter what, even the people who deeply love you, can leave you to be miserably alone. But, you will never be alone if your right kind of love, is you!

Happy Reading! 🙂