I Fell in Love With the Idea of Falling in Love and I Don’t Recommend It

From the time I was a little girl, I have traversed this Earth with the undeniable feeling that I’m looking for something- or perhaps someone. 

I’ve expressed this many times, and yet no one quite understands what I mean. Think of it like this. Every day I wake up, go about my day, and go to bed. While the events that occur between my wake and slumber are beautiful, at the end of the day I feel like something is missing. 

While this could be perceived as a “lack mindset,” the truth is that I’m very grateful for the life that I live, every last perfectly imperfect moment of it. But it's almost like eating your favorite meal only to find out that the one ingredient that makes it exactly how you like it is absent. It’s still delicious, just missing that special something.

This yearning for a once-in-a-lifetime love doesn’t make me special, however. Everyone wants to experience love because everyone wants to be loved. That being said, as corny as it sounds, it’s true that being loved does not free you from the responsibility of loving yourself. To be able to accept love, you have to first cultivate it within.

But I think that I speak for an innumerable amount of 20-somethings when I say this: I’ve loved myself long enough, SO WHERE IS HE?

And while I’ve had quite a few suitors in my two decades of life, they were far from Mr. Right. As much as I have tried to convince myself, I’ve never been in love- not even once. No one has ever made me want a white picket fence, two kids, and a golden retriever. In fact, the only thing I’ve ever wanted after these relationships came to an often messy conclusion, was my time back. 

Perhaps my avoidant attachment style is to blame. 

Attachment theory asserts that the human need to form a close emotional bond with a caregiver is crucial to not only develop properly but to foster healthy relationships with others in the future, says Brittanica. 

In Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller’s Attached, the authors explain that a  person’s attachment style is very much dependent on the relationship or lack thereof that they had with an attachment figure during their childhood. John Bowlby, child psychologist, asserted that “In prehistoric times, being close to a partner was a matter of life and death, and our attachment system developed to treat such proximity as an absolute necessity,” writes Levine and Heller.

In a perilous environment, it would not be beneficial to create a strong emotional bond with just one person, as there is a great chance that that person would die quickly. It makes absolute sense to keep your distance emotionally, hence the avoidant attachment style. In a “harsh environment” it is imperative to remain firmly connected at all costs to your attachment figure to protect one another, hence the anxious attachment style. Meanwhile, “in a peaceful setting”, having an attachment figure would not only benefit those involved but the eventual offspring of the pair, hence the secure attachment style.

If we were all biologically identical in our forms of attachment, then the human race would have been extinct long ago, hence why there are various attachment styles; “Although we all have a basic need to form close bonds, the way we create them varies,” notes Levine and Heller.

When someone, such as myself, has an avoidant attachment style, they often have an ideal vision of what love should look like, very careful to make it so unrealistic that no one can possibly live up to it. Therefore, it justifies pushing them away. It’s self-sabotage 101, and I’m very aware of how it has cut my relationships short.

Every time I embark on a new relationship journey, I enjoy the first month or two, and then am painfully reminded that this partner, as lovely as they may be, just isn't right for me. Or sometimes I have the very opposite experience where I so badly want a situation to work that I know is wrong for me. 

Regardless of the situation, and as harsh as it may sound, I’ve always been more in love with the idea of being in love than the person standing right in front of me.

Maybe I’ve watched too many romcoms, but I can’t seem to get a very specific kind of love out of my head.

Scientifically, love is no more than a cocktail of chemicals in the brain that enables you to be attached to a single person for the primary purpose of survival. But now that we’re out of the Paleolithic era, love is more of a luxury rather than a necessity to our very existence. 

I don’t believe that love necessarily means that you want to spend eternity with one person. Rather, for me, to be loved is to be deeply understood. It’s not only a partnership but a connection that runs so deep it physically hurts to be apart. 

I love the idea of being in love so much that I entertain situations that I know are bound to explode in my face, and more often than not, they do exactly that.

This isn’t some cry for help. I’m not saying that I’m searching love out in dangerous places, or even that I stick around in relationships that don’t serve me. I’m just saying that I so desperately want to experience this emotion that sometimes I convince myself that I do.

This is easy to do when you create a narrative of someone in your head that is not actually who they are. Sometimes you spend so much time daydreaming about what could be that you miss the red flags waving right in front of you. You conjure up a fictional caricature of who someone really is, then act surprised when they go off-script. 

But while most people fall in love with this idea of a single partner, I fall in love with the idea of us. 

As an introvert, “us” seems more appealing than a life of solitude, no matter how much I enjoy my own company. 

I guess this is all a very long-winded way of saying that sometimes you need to see your relationships from the outside in, and truly evaluate whether you are self-sabotaging or settling. 

It’s important to remember that while being in love is appealing, love is still all around us. The love we have for our families, friends, and even pets is what makes life so incredibly beautiful. It’s why we brave all of life’s twists and turns- because we know at the end of the day nothing can top the feeling of loving and being loved.