There’s a question I’ve been sitting with for a while now: Did I love wrong?
It’s not something I say out loud. Not to friends, not to myself when the lights are off and it’s just me and the ceiling. But it lingers there, unspoken. I’ve loved before—at least, I think I did. I still don’t know how to measure love. Maybe that’s the problem.
I thought love was supposed to be gentle. Unselfish. I thought it was enough to wait for someone to be ready, to not ask for more than they could give. I thought love was supposed to be kind, not demanding. But now I wonder if I mistook kindness for silence. If I loved too quietly to be heard.
I’ve always tried to be what I thought people needed—someone patient, someone who doesn’t push. I held back my love, thinking that was the right way to care for someone. I thought giving them space was the same as loving them selflessly. But in the end, it just left me on the sidelines, watching them move on without me. Love didn’t stay. And I didn’t fight for it.
I think about love a lot—what it should look like, how it should feel. We see all these big, bold versions of it. The fights and the grand gestures, the kind of love people tear apart the world for. That wasn’t me. I stayed quiet. Soft. I loved in the way I thought they needed. But now I sit here, wondering if holding back my love was the same as not loving at all.
And so I sit here, years later, not really knowing how to love anymore. I’m not even sure if I want to. Maybe I’ve grown indifferent to it, or maybe I’m just tired of watching love slip through my hands. I don’t fight for it. I don’t chase it. I tell myself it’s because love isn’t something you force—that if it’s meant to stay, it will. But what if that’s just an excuse? What if I’m too afraid to ask for love because I’m scared I’ll lose it again?
Sometimes, I wonder if love ever really knew me at all—if I ever let it. Maybe I kept it at arm’s length for so long that it just gave up and went somewhere else. And the worst part? I can’t even blame it. If I were love, I wouldn’t have stayed either.
I look around at friends who seem to have love figured out—messy, imperfect, but real. I see how they fight for it, how they make room for it in their lives even when it’s inconvenient or scary. They don’t wait for perfect timing or for the other person to be perfectly ready. They just show up. They risk it.
Maybe that’s what I never did. I never let my love be messy. I kept it so neat and quiet that it barely made a sound. I convinced myself that was the right way to love someone—that holding back was the same as giving them freedom. But maybe it was just me, too scared to be seen. Too scared to say, Here I am. This is how I feel. Take it or leave it.
Love isn’t supposed to be something you tiptoe around. It’s not about waiting for someone to open the door and invite you in. Sometimes, you have to knock. Sometimes, you have to risk hearing, I don’t want this. And maybe that’s what I didn’t understand before—loving someone means showing up, even when it might hurt. It means letting yourself be seen, even if you don’t know how they’ll respond.
I wish I’d learned that sooner. I wish I’d been brave enough to love out loud—to let my love take up space instead of shrinking it down into something unnoticeable. I can’t go back and change the way I loved. I can’t rewrite the parts of me that stayed quiet when I should’ve spoken up. But I can try to do better next time.
If there’s one thing I’m learning, it’s that love doesn’t always look the way we expect. It isn’t always grand or perfect or tidy. Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes it’s scary. And sometimes it asks you to risk everything, with no promise of what you’ll get in return.
So, I’m trying. I’m trying to believe that love is still out there, even if I don’t quite know how to find it again. I’m trying to be brave enough to let it in—to stop holding back, to stop waiting for the perfect moment that may never come.
Because love doesn’t wait. It shows up. It risks. It takes up space.
And maybe, just maybe, I can too.