I Just Wanted to Be Loved

I remember swinging as high as I could on a swing when I was five years old, pumping my legs hard and fast so that maybe my toes would touch the sky. As I soared back and forth I felt this amazing feeling inside my chest of being totally present and connected. It was the eighties and I would spend hours on swings from this age, singing songs, dreaming about the person I would marry and the children I would have. I would pretend that I was singing these songs to my future husband or him to me, imagining this deep love we would have for each other. I don’t remember a point in my life where I wasn’t thinking about being loved and in love, or trying to make it work with someone so that these dreams I had might become real. I grew up watching movies and tv series that showed me that my life would be complete once I found my true love. That I didn’t have to worry if this man was broken or bad because by the power of my love he could become good. That all a man needed was a good kind woman and he would love her so much, being faithful and sweet. Love songs and movies shaped my view of the world and I became a true romantic whose chest felt light when I imagined a true loves kiss or being kissed on the neck while we cooked together. I’ve come to decide that the media I was exposed to as a child ruined my life by filling my mind with illusions and a complete lack of reality when it came to love.

I have always been someone with a very vivid imagination. I see something once and if it creates an emotion in me the image will stick with me for life, not only that but I can pretend that it is my life. I spent so much of my childhood playing inside of my mind. Creating worlds and characters that didn’t exist. Entire lives with families and homes, happiness and love. I found this fantasy world comforting. It wrapped around me when life felt too much or things weren’t going how I believed they should. I loved that one moment something wasn’t known in the world and that I could choose to bring it out of my mind with words to give it life. I would test out my stories on family and friends as they humoured me with my very creative explanations for why things had happened the way they had or what I thought about it. Friends parents often saw me as a troublemaker because of this even though I was just trying to put more colour in the world. I look back on my childhood and I can feel the characters I created and the lives they chose to lead. I can still feel that hope in my chest that I felt back then of the love I would find.

The problem came for me though when living in this imaginary world, painting pictures of the life I wanted to have, became a coping mechanism. Throughout my marriage I would dream of a life with my true love. I knew more than a decade before I left my marriage that this man wasn’t the person I was going to spend my life with. I cared about him to a point, but I didn’t love him, or more so wasn’t in love with him. He wasn’t in love with me either but was perfectly content with the life we had, when he was the one controlling it. So my way to feel I was in control was to live inside my mind. I’d be doing the dishes while my husband scowled at me from across the room but I’d be imagining a conversation with my love where we were joking around having missed each other all day. I would be laying in bed at night and convincing myself I could feel the arms of my love around me. I saw him playing with my children in our backyard while I lay in a hammock reading a book looking up to smile at them all. The worse things in my marriage got the more I lived inside my mind.

When I did leave my marriage and met my ex I thought he was this man. He listened very carefully to what I wanted and he shaped himself into that person. He told me he was that person and I believed his words because he spoke like poetry to me. In the beginning his actions showed me he was that man too. The first time he wrapped his arms around me while I was cooking and kissed my neck I teared up. It all felt as perfect in reality as it had in my mind. The problem is my mind was choosing to look past the red flags and things that should have made me dig deeper because it was so caught up in having the real life version of what I had dreamed about for more than three decades. I wanted so badly to just be loved and this man threw me lines about him being a bad person but now because he had my love he was good, I believed him. I felt magical and powerful. For a period of time I did feel that love and I let myself fall so deeply, without caution or fear. It amazes me that I was able to be that open and trusting, that hopeful and free. It was the child in me coming out because she thought it was safe to finally be me and have love.

Being in two abusive relationships in a row with the second being so much worse than the first I have felt defeated. I still don’t understand some days how that hopeful little girl who followed what the world taught her love should be got so crushed by the thing that was meant to be the beginning of my happiness. I don’t understand how my path in life lead me to such deep levels of pain and torment at the hands of men when I held my heart out each time and just asked for them to love me. I do understand that my wanting to be loved by someone else to such a deep level that I let it consume my life meant that my self love was incredibly low. I treated the men in my life who were awful to me better than I treated myself. The thing I am learning is that love isn’t meant to hurt that much. Love isn’t meant to make you cry that much or make you feel worthless. Love isn’t meant to be used as a weapon against you so that you will give everything you have to someone else until they’ve sucked you completely dry. Love isn’t meant to be all there is.

I just wanted to be loved and I wish I had been told instead the importance of loving myself. Of being an independent person who explored the world, did all of the things I wanted to do for myself, and then at that point decided if love is something I wanted. I wish that movies and books had of shown me strong women who were unashamedly following their passions and doing it alone. I know the world is moving that way a bit now but that doesn’t mean that the three decades of media I was exposed to before that didn’t have a deep and lasting impact on me. I wish I had of seen movies where women were in love so that maybe I would have had the courage to call the girl that gave me her number when I was eighteen instead of following the path to a prince charming. I feel like I’m so intelligent yet when it comes to love I can be incredibly naive and way too hopeful. I know now that this desire to find love has vanished from me. It’s a very strange feeling for the first time in my life to have not one tiny piece of me looking for love or craving it. In fact the idea of being in a relationship with someone or even going on a date makes me feel physically ill. This last relationship killed something in me and the eerie silence that radiates through my body where the hope of love used to flow is taking some getting used to. My brain freezes at times as it’s unsure what it’s meant to be doing.

For so long it dreamt and built these imaginary worlds, for so long I was in the pursuit of love, but now it feels like that’s all over. I haven’t once painted pictures with my mind since ending that relationship. The desire to escape into that is gone. I just wanted to be loved and now I don’t know what I want at all, and that’s okay. It’s time for me to get to know myself in reality and to say goodbye to that part of me that kept my hope alive for so long. Now my hope is different and has evolved. It no longer has a man as a central part of it, instead it has my happiness and I’m accepting whatever form that may come in. I’m accepting that it isn’t going to be in the form of a person because my happiness needs to come from within and not from someone. I was told the other day about things I could do when I find my special someone. I replied that there wasn’t going to be anyone and they smiled at me and said well fate works in mysterious ways and you’ll meet someone. I informed them that no I would not because I don’t want love. Why does me working on finding my own happiness and planning a life as a single person make others want to set me up or frequently tell me I’ll find my person? What if there just isn’t a person for me? Maybe that isn’t meant to be for me in this lifetime, and I am actually getting to a place in me where that is more than okay. I’ve gone from being the girl who wanted so badly to be loved, to the girl who wants to be left alone so she can smash her goals and make herself happy, and honestly that sounds like the perfect happily ever after to me.