Love is always complicated. Always. Especially when you fall head-over-heels for someone who is unable to reciprocate such emotions for you. It’s extremely painful, the thought of not being good enough for the person who you would cross over oceans for. I’ve witnessed these types of experiences before, and have come to the realization that many people’s vision of love is warped.

People say that they hate love all of the time. In reality, they only hate it when it doesn’t work out the way they want it to. We compare love to despondency, rejection, and pain. All of the things that are products of being hurt, and while those feelings are relevant they are not love in its entirety. Loving someone is about being selfless, and not being upset when they can’t say that they love you back.

There really is no way to describe the amount of maturity it takes to be able to love someone from afar. Being in love with someone after so much history is such a different love from that of loving someone who doesn’t feel the same. When you think about it rationally, is love from one side really even considered love? It takes two. Two choices, two made up minds to stick by someone else through thick and thin, to make things work. One-sided loves are desperate, fleeting, and based solely on infatuation. That’s where the confusion hits most people, because they end up associating this pain with something that, when real, is extraordinary.

I know from experience that if you are trying too hard to make something work, it will never work. There should be a balanced amount of effort on both sides if you expect things to flourish between yourself and another person. It can’t be just you that wants it. In that respect, I strongly believe that one-sided love is just a form of morphine to numb the pain from within a lot of people. It’s really easy to focus all of your attention on someone in hopes that they will help you forget about all of the things you dislike about yourself.

If you feel like need to find someone to validate you, or give you love, then you are already setting yourself and your relationships up for failure. No matter what anyone tells you, relationships are built from the foundations of how you choose to love the person that you are, first. If you don’t know how to love you, then how can you expect someone else to? How can you expect not to be torn into pieces when/if they leave?

When you can’t look in the mirror and be happy with yourself but expect someone else to, it is rather unfair. It is also part of the reason why things won’t work out, and why you can get so easily discouraged and emotionally shattered.

I have found that if you can’t be alone, then you can’t really be with anyone, because you’ll always look for things within yourself to get in the way. If you’re in a relationship but feel like you are unable to devote your whole self to said relationship, that is just as one-sided as loving someone who doesn’t love you back. Loneliness is good. It’s healthy for your ego to be hurt. It’s okay to make the choices that are going to benefit you even if no one else likes them. If you’re using people as if they are on assembly lines to fix the broken pieces of yourself, you won’t ever learn to fix them. You’ll always need something from someone: A new heart to adore you, hand to hold, body to share warmth with. Whatever it is, it will always be empty. And one day, one day it will all catch up with you. You place in others what should’ve been in you all along.