For the past two or so years, any time a friend of mine tells me about their guy problems, and I say, "I know exactly how you feel," they look at me like I am an out-of-touch-with-society grandma who is trying to comment on an issue forlorn to her time.
This is because I am engaged to my best friend and boyfriend of roughly six years, and I am absolutely and completely in love.
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But the fact of the matter is, I wasn't always. There had been a point in time where I had entirely lost sight of who I was, I had a crisis, and Kieran and I broke up for a short few months in high school. During this time, I started casually seeing another person out of emptiness, and I confused the idea of not wanting to be alone with with being in love.
I find that a very common case with young people today, especially young women. We see these fantastical love stories that are messy and complicated in the wrong ways (and sometimes border-line mentally unhealthy) and we desire to have this roller-coaster, fairy tale love story derived out of passion and brokenness and "deep love." Even the words sound lovely.
However, there are two problems with this premises:
1) We are not actors in a movie, and emotional destruction isn't sexy in real life.
2) Usually, if someone treats you badly, and I mean truly and repetitively treats you with a lack of respect and faithfulness, they don't care about you as much as they profess to.
When I was seeing this said person briefly, I was very aware that I liked him way more than he liked me, and that he really didn't like me much at all. The funny thing is, he isn't even a bad human being, he just truly didn't see me as anything special, significant or worthy of in a romantic way. I knew this, and for some reason, I projected this onto myself and convinced myself that I wasn't meeting required standards, I wasn't funny enough, witty enough, I wasn't this or that enough, and it wasn't his fault (you can't make yourself be in love with somebody who you aren't supposed to be with).
I had tried to find myself, and my identity, through the eyes of someone else, and that proved to be extremely dangerous and I see it happening very often; when we try to define ourselves by a forced idea of society's love story and how well we are executing that idea in real life, and when we try to define ourself through someone else, when things go south and end, we feel that we lost all that we are. I had made his opinion on who he thought I was interchangeable to who I thought I was. I was never in love, I was in love with the idea that someone loved me, even if I knew it wasn't real love or even real like. When I lost him I didn't lose love, I lost who I thought I was, I lost the chance to gain his approval, I lost this fragmented, backwards idea that I had of being loved. And I prayed to God every night for weeks that he would call me back, message me, let me know that I mattered and was worthy as a human being.
The answer was a clear no. And quite frankly, I became angry with my God because I was hurting and he didn't fix me the way that I wanted to be fixed.
And he never did. He never gave in to my prayers and pleadings. He didn't give me what I wanted, because he was giving me what I needed.
He didn't want me to find myself in someone else, he wanted me to find myself in the one who created me, and he wanted me to look to him and look inside of myself to come up with who I was, and to know that I was already, and had always been, good enough. Good enough for someone to love, good enough to do good things, good enough to create and love and grow by myself. He wanted me to love myself so that I could realize the love that I deserved, and he wanted me to love myself so that I could love someone else adequately.
Kieran and I got engaged last summer. He is one of the only human beings that I know who had loved me always, no matter what I said, did, or was going through, no matter how much I seemed to be coming unglued. He never tried to make this a sad, artsy love story about cliché brokenness, he told me that I deserved better, and he had complete faith in me; he truly helped love me whole.
He loves me whole every day. He loves me whole by encouraging me to seek Jesus, by encouraging me to do what I love and to do it passionately and well. He corrects me when I'm wrong and holds me accountable for my actions and speaks words of love and life and beauty into me every single day, and I truly laugh at myself in disbelief that I ever dared to think that I knew who I needed better that God did. That I could make a better love story than He can.
I believe that Christ made us inside and out. The same God who flung the stars in the sky and calls them by name knows who we are and created us, and he has a plan and a love story so much more intimate than we could ever come up with on our own.
My (way) future children are going to be able to look at their parents and know that they are in love, real love. I get to know this every day. I get to think thoughts like this every single day.
Thank God that I didn't get what I wanted.
