Stop Putting Your Love in A Box

Don’t be the person to limit yourself

I just want to start off by saying there is nothing wrong with having a certain “type” you’re looking for in love, but you should not be eliminating potential matches because they’re not your type.

Stop putting your love in a box. Love is something that can’t be forced. If you’re forcefully trying to get rid of a certain type of person you don’t think you’d get along with within a relationship, you’re already limiting yourself. Again, it’s perfectly okay to have a “type”, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore everyone outside that boundary you’ve set for yourself.

In fact, love can pop up in the wildest places. It’s supposed to be unexpected, and if you spend your entire life chasing after something that’s never gonna happen, that is not loving. You can be head over heels for someone, but if you’re trying to force someone to love you, you’re just wasting your time and theirs.

I just recently learned about not limiting yourself in love, and honestly, I wish I had taken that advice earlier. It could have been extremely useful earlier in my life when I was chasing after a girl I had no chance with, while there was a girl waiting for me right there I didn’t see. Only after she moved away, which seems to be a common theme with how my attempts at relationships end, did I realize how much of a colossal mistake it was.

My friends have told me before I’m a complete and utter imbecile when it comes to noticing who’s into who and who doesn’t even want to be in the same room as someone. They’re probably right. I’m good at picking up people’s little quirks, habits, and tells, but noticing that is a yikes and a half.

With that in mind, it should probably come as no surprise that this situation has popped up and I’ve failed to recognize it until after someone has told me. I’m not gullible per se, but I’m just not up to speed in that department. It’s also not a thing where girls are all over me, because that’s a funny joke and never going to happen, but more a case of where a girl I’ve befriended and become relatively close with starts overstepping the line of friendship.

I’ll admit I’ve tried to initiate and have overstepped a couple of times, but when it is the other way around I’m as blind as a bat. The most notable case where this happened was also back in elementary because little me just got around I guess. Not that it ever ended up amounting to anything, of course.

Anyways, I’m pretty sure that around the same time I stopped having a crush on the first girl I ever liked, I thought that I had to find someone else or I wasn’t doing something right, because I guess I was just that kid growing up. I definitely put myself in a box, and I definitely paid the price for it later. Because I liked her, I thought that I had to like someone else from her friend group since we didn’t work out.

I so wish someone had taught me this BEFORE all this occurred.

It went slow at first, but afterward, I went way out of my comfort zone to go after this girl’s friend, who I’ll dub Amy. As in, on Valentine’s Day, I even gave her friends candy. It was the perfect example of what not to do, but it seemed to make Amy happy so I was okay with it. Another thing about me is I’m really bad at hiding my feelings, and I’m terrible at poker because of it. Go figure.

She obviously knew I liked her, but the feeling was not in any way mutual. I basically was just there to get her stuff, and let’s just say I’m just glad it was a short-lived attempt at romance. I don’t know why I thought it was going to work, we were drastically different and she was much too pampered to be with someone like me. I was basically her sugar daddy, except I wasn’t her daddy, and wasn’t at all charming.

The part that stung about this whole fiasco is that there was a girl waiting for me right next to me. She enjoyed the same things that I did, we got along great, and she was always going around offering me advice. We wrote stories together and would present them to the class occasionally, so at least little me was doing that right. I couldn’t catch a girl to save my life, but the man did little me know he wanted to write.

While I was chasing Amy, she laughed at me. Skyla, we’ll call her Skyla, would laugh with me. I really never knew until after she left that she had feelings for me, and I regret that kind of opportunity slipped through my fingers. And trust me, I don’t regret things very often.

I never saw her as more than a friend, and it’s a little depressing to sum it up this way, but I basically rejected her every time we were around each other. Because I put myself in a box, I wasn’t able to see through the outside and see what was already set up for me. Because I put myself in a box, I ended up basically being a servant to a very one-sided relationship.

Now, that’s not to say if you put yourself in a box you’ll end up the exact same way as me, but you get the point. Also, when I say don’t put yourself in a box, I don’t mean chase after every person you can think of. That’s not going to help you, and just make you look desperate.

No one said determining how many people you push for a relationship with would be easy, but then again, in life what is easy?