You Should Wait For This Kind Of Love
You should wait for the love that you’ve always wanted, not the one you’ve settled for.
By Ashley Oken
You should wait for the kind of love that doesn’t scare you, the kind that makes you lay your fears and apprehensions to rest because you’re safe in it.
You should wait for the kind of love that envelops your trauma, past hurts, and turns that history on its head, making you push it back into the recesses of your mind, as these coping mechanisms aren’t needed here.
You should wait for the kind of love that doesn’t feel performative, the kind that you don’t have to force, and the kind that you feel in your bones.
You should wait for the kind of love that makes you feel truly beautiful, desirable, and comfortable in your skin, in all of your warts, and in your totality.
You should wait for the kind of love that adds to your happiness, like a strawberry on top of an ice cream sundae.
You should wait for the kind of love that you want to shout about from the rooftops, quietly tell your family and friends about at a fancy dinner party, and have no problems mentioning to anyone in your life, as you’re not embarrassed of it.
You should wait for the kind of love that makes you feel genuinely happy within it and supported by it, one that holds your dreams and ambitions close to it and gently pushes them forward and vice versa.
You should wait for the kind of love that makes all of those love songs make sense, leading you to think of them warmly on the subway ride home as your Spotify playlist reverberates in your eardrums.
You should wait for the kind of love that makes you feel rare, beautiful and the kind of love that sees you for the gorgeously imperfect human that you are and doesn’t ask you to unreasonably change for it.
You should wait for the kind of love that mirrors the best qualities of humanity and reflects them back to you- kindness, compassion, and understanding.
You should wait for the kind of love that is intertwined with mutual respect, enthusiastic consent, abundant humor, and mutual support.
You should wait for the kind of love that ebbs and flows with your life, feelings, and stage of growth, not one that feels fair-weather, expects some sort of stagnation by one partner for the growth of the other, and one that dominates or controls your life.
You should wait for the kind of love that makes your past attempts at feeling love for others seem futile, as what you’re feeling now is beyond the infatuation and lust you’ve felt in the past.
You should wait for the kind of love that feels easy, comfortable, and akin to best friendship.
You should wait for a love that feels like home, dripping in the warmth of your family’s hugs, the love in your friends’ nuggets of wisdom, and in the knowledge that this is where you’re supposed to be.
You should wait for a realistic love- one that may not start with a bang, but with a quiet hum, and one that may not start when or with whom you expected, as those forms of it are just as beautiful as ones depicted in rom-coms.
You should wait for the kind of love that makes you feel free and liberated, one in which you don’t have to be anybody but yourself.
You should wait for the love that makes you believe in love again.
You should wait for the love that you’ve always wanted, not the one you’ve settled for.
You should wait for a love that loves you.