The Unexpected

A lot of my therapy sessions over the last three months have revolved around one quiet, unsettling thought: I don't know if I see myself in another romantic relationship. Not one that would make me happy. Not one where I'd feel comfortable.

I'd gone on dates here and there, but nothing ever stuck. I was beginning to feel like something was wrong with me.

Which didn't make sense, because I've always been very much a lover girl. I adored my partners when we were together, even when they were clearly not the person for me. I loved the excitement of meeting someone new, the possibility of it all. I'd date multiple people at once just to figure out what I liked, and when one person walked out of my life, it usually wasn't long before another one found their way in.

But my last "relationship" (if you could even call it that) ended last July, and I didn't even cry. I just... accepted it. That alone caused me to realize something was wrong. I had been forcing myself to be involved with people I didn't even really like.

That's when I started to fear the idea that I had become avoidant. My love life blowing up less than a year before that July, had shut down whatever lover girl I had left in me. And that scared me.

I've always dreamed of being in a happy, reliable, safe, and loving relationship. My childhood was chaos, and all I've ever wanted was to find a place to lay my head down in someone's lap and say, "okay, it's calm here, it's safe here" and sink into that love.

But somehow, my dating life always went in the opposite direction. I was starting to realize I had been choosing people who would've never even allowed my head to simply rest on their shoulder. It always felt like anxiety—like heart palpitations and constant effort. Like I was fighting just to get someone to meet me halfway.

And then came this unexpected shift.

I'd never felt like this. It didn't feel like emptiness, it was quieter than that. It was this sense of acceptance. That's exactly what it was, acceptance.

I figured maybe this was just who I was now. That I was going to start focusing on the career and my future family, you know, building a life that didn't revolve around romance. I figured at some point, I would find someone else when the time was right. It felt like it would take a very long time before I would experience that again. But I thought the lover girl had died in me, and if she hadn't, she was completely quiet and I could not feel her. It felt hard to lose that familiar part of me.

And then there I was, just standing there waiting for my order, when I heard someone tell me they liked my outfit. I looked up at them and thought about it for about the next five weeks.

I thought about it until it was almost embarrassing. Until it was the only thing I could seem to think about. And then I would bump into that same voice again and again and feel ridiculous that I could not manage to control myself from smiling.

That part of me I thought I'd lost? She hadn't gone anywhere. She had been quietly waiting. Sending me into having a crush at the big age of 29. A giggly, butterflies, silly crush. It felt like going from complete silence to someone turning the volume all the way up.

I've thought a lot about people saying that love shows up when you stop looking for it. I don't know if anything would come from this.

But there is something deeply comforting about knowing that my lover girl is still very much in there.

So, if or when we get to the point of thinking romance may never return to our lives, are we actually broken—or are we just waiting for the right person to wake it up and correctly?