A Reminder That Forced Love Is Worse Than Being Alone

This is your wake up call. This the call you’ve been ignoring, the one mettling in your mind each night, the one you try to shut off when you fall asleep but instead blaringly keeps you awake. This is the wakeup call you don’t want but know you need.

One day you’ll fall in love. Truly in love. You won’t guess if it’s the love for you. You won’t read self-help articles trying to understand why your partner doesn’t have time for you or text you or call you as often as you’d like. You won’t ignore conversations with your friends in which you know they’re going to say truth you don’t want to hear. You won’t lay awake at night, wondering if there is someone else out there better for you.

You don’t need someone else to protect you from feeling alone. You have friends. You have family. And even if it doesn’t seem like your friends or family care about you right now, I’ll bet you that if you contact them, tell them you left a love that wasn’t the right one, they’ll be overjoyed to accept you back into their lives.

Part of the reason you feel alone is because you’ve isolated your thoughts into convincing yourself that you should love someone who does not treat you right because no one else in your life is doing so. The truth is that the people in your life have ceased conversation with you because they have tried to admit that this love, the one you aren’t insane about it, is not love, and yet there you are, trying to deny it.

Instead, you’re denying yourself real love. You’re locking yourself away from a bright, beautiful soul who is ready to devote themselves to you, and instead, you’re choosing to settle into a love that is hardly worth the time. Do you ever wonder why this love doesn’t feel like the last? Do you ever wonder why this love doesn’t tell you they love you? It’s because they don’t. And you know that.

So stop forcing this love on yourself. Stop harming your thoughts into believing this is the best you can do. You’re only creating a lonelier atmosphere than you had when you were falling out of love. And trust me, once you leave this love, once you are alone, you’ll wonder why you never felt so good in your skin as you will after you leave them. It is better to leave someone you are not crazy about then to string them along, to string both of you along before it’s too late to let go without hurting someone. Pull the bandaid off before it’s too early. Save yourself. Find happiness in your loneliness.

It may feel better to have someone’s arms around you, to believe they can cure you of pain, but it is more painful to admit the truth to yourself, to realize that fake love is even more painful than real love or real loneliness.

Falling in love with the idea of love is more gut-wrenching than falling out of love. At some point, you will have to admit to yourself that the love wasn’t real, it was a placeholder, and all that time you were convincing yourself to believe it was love, you could have been searching for yourself, preparing yourself to fall in love when you were ready and not when you were lonely.

When you rush love, when you rush the time it takes to recover from previous heartbreaks and failures, you’re disservicing your ability to heal. The time alone is what will develop you as a person, to become stronger and wiser, to know who you actually love and why you love them rather than just adoring the idea of love.

But this isn’t the time. And this is your true, honest reminder that forced love is worse than being alone.