When You’re The Girl Who Never Falls In Love

(Extracted from Thoughtcatalog, written by Charlotte Green.)

When you’re the one who has crushes, who thinks it might work, who stretches out an imaginary life with someone for years on end, but who never really makes it happen, you know it. You know that there is something wrong with you, that you can’t just have a normal relationship where two people fall into place and everything is happy ever after. Even when someone does fall for you in return, you immediately pull away, so sure that anyone who loves you couldn’t be someone you’d want to be with.

Maybe it’s because you never fell in love with yourself, never saw yourself the way others can, never made a real list of all your best qualities and forced yourself to read it. Maybe you thought love was just never in the cards because there are so many better things to do in life — travel, career, friends, new restaurants to try — and you kept putting it off again and again. And now, here you are, older than you thought you would be when you were in your “forever” relationship, and totally alone.

You don’t know how to fall in love. You don’t know what happens after the first few good dates, where it can actually go, except one of two places: Either you desire the person deeply because they withhold everything real for you, or you lose all respect for them because they want to be with you for real. There is never a third option, never a healthy one, never something that you can hold onto. You think you’ve been in love, maybe, but you’ve never really fallen. You’ve never held someone as the both of you let go completely.

You ask yourself all the time if you’re missing out, if your friends know that you’re making it up as you go when you’re all talking about the weddings and children and lives with someone that you want. You don’t know if you want it, because you don’t know if it’s possible. You don’t know if anything is particularly wrong with you, you just know that there is a storyline of love that everyone else gets to follow except for you. There is a secret club out there for people who have figured out how to fall in love, and you don’t know the password.

So you keep trying. You sign up for online dating and you let your friends set you up and you hope that one of these days, everything will change and you will get to live the kind of love that you have always imagined will happen in your “adult” life. You keep hoping that you won’t finish your life as the girl who couldn’t find love, as the girl who couldn’t let herself truly fall, the girl who only loved the people she knew would never love her back. Because being alone is okay today, when there is so much else to do, but one day you know you will be tired — and all you’ll want to do is hold someone.

Losing A Best Friend
By Mila Jaroniec

When it happens, you won’t want to believe it. You’ll take their word for it when they say they’re busy, swamped at work, “just doing me.” You’ll make excuses for them, put your ringer on extra loud in case they call. But you’ll still feel the change, and because you can’t rationalize it, you’ll try to ignore it.

It’s a specific kind of loneliness that hits you like a wave of nausea. When the two of you are having a beer and you realize that you have both been staring out the same window for twenty minutes, nothing to say, the opposite of a comfortable silence. When they cancel plans consistently and stall when giving you reasons. When you scroll through your contacts and stop at their name and almost call but don’t, feeling suddenly, inexplicably, abandoned and confused.

Sometimes there’s no huge fight that marks the end of a friendship. No falling out, no major disagreement. Sometimes it just falls apart for no good reason. Distance. New relationships. Priorities. Somehow these things can become more important than your connection; they shouldn’t but they do. And as we get older we tend to downsize, prioritize. Trim the corners of our lives, keeping what’s important and discarding what isn’t. Sometimes we stop needing people in our lives and it isn’t even conscious. No one wakes up in the morning actively thinking “Hmm, I think I’ll stop being friends with so-and-so today.” It just goes out with an empty fizz, like a cigarette hitting the bottom of a Coke can.

In so many ways, losing a close friend is worse than losing a lover. Lovers are transient for the most part but friends are supposed to be there for you always, or so we like to believe. Friendship is a special kind of love that’s not supposed to fade. You never expect the one person you thought you could always depend on to disappear without saying goodbye. And when they do you feel sickeningly stupid and cheated, wondering what you meant to them all along, whether you were just convenient or in the right place at the right time. You never really know for sure.

You look through pictures from back when you were happy — holding each other up drunk and ecstatic, working on art projects on a rainy Sunday afternoon — and can’t understand what happened. Reach for the phone. Attach a photo to an email, start the subject line with some fusion of “Remember this?” and “I miss you…” Get suddenly overwhelmed by a horrible emptiness and discard the draft, leaving the phone untouched. History. So much history flushed down a dirty sink.

And the worst part is, you don’t even know how to explain yourself. You know if you bring this up with them they’ll give you a blank expression and a blank excuse. You don’t want to explain how you feel. You can’t. You just want them to get it, to read you like they used to be able to. You want to take them by the shoulders and shake them, screaming Where are you? What happened?! Until you’re blue in the face. But you can’t do that either, because you’re no longer on the same level and it’s going to make you feel crazy.

In life, it’s a given that you will lose people. People will flow in and out like curtains through an open window, sometimes for no reason at all. But losing someone important to you will feel like a suckerpunch every single time, and you’ll never see it coming. Which makes the friendships that do hold out, the ones that make it through countless breakdowns and breakthroughs and changes and years, so damn important.