Honestly, I never thought I’d long for a relationship while feeling so certain that I’m not ready for one.
And yet, sometimes I imagine wearing a beautiful white gown and walking down the aisle. Of being, perhaps for the first and only time, the prettiest person in the room. There is something undeniably beautiful about promising your life to someone you love.
But the first step has always been the hardest.
Not the marriage, but the relationship that comes before it. Because I still don’t know how to let someone in without fearing I’ll lose
myself.
I’ve never found it easy to imagine someone choosing me. I’ve always believed there was someone brighter, prettier, or easier to love than I was. And if I ever stood out, it was only because of my academic excellence.
For a long time, I wondered whether it was my body or the way I am. But I believe there’s no need to change anything about myself just to be loved. After all, love begins with loving myself.
Maybe that’s why I held onto that idea so tightly.
I taught myself to do everything on my own, without relying on anyone. I learned to carry my own disappointments, make my own decisions, and stand on my own through my fears, all to prove that I could be enough by myself.
I didn’t realize that my independence had become less of a choice and more of a habit.
It became my way of protecting myself from the possibility of losing someone I had come to depend on.
But perhaps that’s only half the truth.
The other half is that I’ve always been afraid that the life I want may never fit into someone else’s idea of love.
The future is uncertain. I don’t know if I want children. I don’t dream of becoming the sort of wife who quietly sets her own ambitions aside simply to fulfil someone else’s expectations one day. I want to keep writing, keep dreaming, keep becoming. I want a love that walks beside my life, not one that replaces it.
And what if that’s too much to ask?
What if one day I love someone deeply, only to discover that the future they imagine has no room for the woman I truly am? What if they ask for children I cannot promise, or a life I cannot happily live? What if the only way to keep them is to surrender parts of myself, little by little, until I no longer recognize the person I have become?
I think that’s what frightens me most.
Not being alone. I have always known how to be alone.
It’s loving someone enough that losing them would hurt, while knowing that staying might mean losing myself instead.
And still, despite every hesitation, I cannot pretend I don’t long for it.
I want to love. I want to be loved. I want the quiet kind of romance that feels like coming home, not the kind that asks me to change, but the one that welcomes the person I already am.
So perhaps I’m not ready for a relationship, not today, and perhaps not for years. My heart still hesitates, and my body tells me the same. But I don’t think that means I’ll never be ready.
I won’t rush.
Perhaps the greatest love story I’ll ever write one day is the one where I never lose myself, no matter who walks beside me.
