This Is How You Love A Damaged Person

You will never return to how you were before them, so either take it or leave it.

Loving a damaged person is absorbing their poison and hoping it ends before you’ll lie dead on the ground. It’s saving someone while you’re losing yourself in the process. It’s never knowing whether what’s between you is real or not. It’s being stuck in a loop of mind games, never figuring out when will they come to an end.

You get consumed by their darkness, depriving you of oxygen, and they become the only thing you can breathe. They will give you just enough of themselves to hang on there, to stay close. They won’t let you go because deep down they need you, but they won’t give you any more of themselves because they know how powerful feelings may be.

This is not the kind of love you see in movies, nor is it romantic in any way. It’s not the story of two people who fall in love with each other, go out on exquisite dates, text all day, and open their hearts to one another during midnight calls. It’s not spontaneous adventures and sweet “miss you” notes. It’s not the live version of Ed Sheeran songs.

No.

Loving a damaged person is one of the hardest, bravest things you could ever go through. It’s a series of battles that will change you forever, battles few are strong enough to endure. Loving a damaged person requires rivers of patience and oceans of love.

It’s fighting for someone who’s only half present, half available. Someone who keeps your relationship undefined, someone who locks their feelings in a valve with no keys. It’s climbing the walls they’ve built around themselves, and never quite reaching the top. It’s desperately shouting out for them to open up, as they dive deeper into themselves as you approach.

It’s being sent mixed signals because they want you, yet they fear you. They fear the feeling that still haunts them from the past, the feeling of being hurt, the feeling of being left behind.

And they realize that this feeling only comes from being vulnerable, from opening up to people, from making them see the real you, the person you are trying to hide behind your shallow skin. That’s why they have mastered ways to protect themselves from getting hurt.

The smell of betrayal still lingers on their door, and whatever you do and no matter how much you try, it seems impossible to prove to them that you’re not like the rest, that you will never leave them, that your love is stronger that any force in this world.

Because staying with a damaged person requires all the love you could possibly have. It’s a win or lose game. In the end, it’s either winning the war or losing everything; including yourself.

Loving a damaged person is self-destruction, it’s agony, it’s toxin running all through your body, it’s 2 AM tears all over your pillow; it’s simply hell on Earth.

You are sent on a mission to slowly peel their shield, layer by layer, and part by part. To slowly melt their heart. It might take you months to make cracks in the iceberg they have inhabited, and years to touch their soul. It’s a task meant only to the strong willed, to the patient, to the ones who know how to love unconditionally, because the truth is, loving someone who has been hurt is caring for them while expecting anything in return.

Loving a damaged person is a war, a war few are ready to fight, that’s why they are often left alone. They seem to us like strong independent people who need no one, but inside they are the most vulnerable beings needing a hand to hold and a soul to understand.

Damaged people crave love more than anything else, yet they run from it at its very sight. They want an emotional connection, yet every time they try to establish one, ghosts of their past start haunting them, carrying images of the pain they had to endure. They push you away, yet secretly hope you would still insist on staying. Damaged people are so full of love, and that’s exactly why they’re so afraid to fall in it.

They are people who have learned to put themselves first because they are tired of giving their all to the ones who’ll eventually leave. They have been through the darkest tunnels of life and have witnessed what it means to stand alone on the edge of the world with no hand to hold as the winds get stronger. They have seen the devils in those who wore angel disguise, and now have a hard time trusting faces. They have been in stories no one will ever hear about, they have stayed awake on nights their mind would wonder to the forbidden places. They know what it took them to make it here, and they are not willing to allow anyone to hurt them again.

That’s why, if you choose to love a damaged person, you have to be patient with them, you have to be delicate, you have to make the first step too many times, and most importantly, you must have real feelings for them, feelings that will endure the challenges of time, the battles awaiting you, the storms approaching the coast of your heart. And the tragedy is that in a world full of options and opportunities, in a world where most roads are smoothly paved, few will ever choose the rigid path to a damaged person’s heart.