I Am Not In Love And It's Okay

I am not in love right now. And it’s okay.

I’ve always wondered why I seem to have a really rotten luck at love. It’s not that nobody comes along, as a matter of fact I can’t say that I’ve been completely single for longer than two weeks since I was twenty. That’s six years of going through the “meeting a guy – falling in love – him or me or both of us falling out of love – breaking up – getting depressed – moving on – and meeting another guy” cycle over and over and over again. It used to be somewhat fun, when I was still the wide-eyed boy eager to relish love’s every taste, but now it has become exhausting. I can’t keep on having three-week relationships. It’s just not good for the heart.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why my relationships always seemed to fail right from the early stages. Eventually, it became apparent that my relationships were divided into three cases: one is where the other guy is not as invested as I am, one is where the other guy wants to invest but is reluctant to do so, and the last is where the other guy likes me just as much or even more than I like him.

Whenever I meet someone who seems promising, I always get inexplicably drawn to him. This is normal, I suppose, if I were thirteen and had pigtails. Yes, that’s the kind of infatuation that I feel. I completely obsess over the guy and it becomes my sole purpose for existence to catch his attention and impress him.

Things would be simple if he doesn’t respond to my advances. When that happens, I take the hint and back off. The trouble starts when I sense that the waters flow in my favor, because that’s when I start to expect. I take my courtship rituals to an even higher level, making it clear that I want to be his boyfriend and that I want to be the only one whom he will consider.

At this point, it becomes apparent that I am already an easy catch. For some guys, this appears as a huge flaw. For some reason, there are guys who get drawn to me because they saw me as this exciting boy who likes to collect toys. However, the moment they see that I am, in fact, after something a lot more long-term, they lose interest. This frustrates me and I try to prove to the guy that I am every bit the catch that he first saw me to be, but that just turns him off even more.

For other guys, my hopeless romantic tendencies would have been seen as an asset, but they cannot bring themselves to believe it. This is especially true when I date older guys. They think that since I am still young, I am bound to play around. This frustrates me just as much as the first kind, sometimes even more. I find it unfair to not be given a chance because of some random assessment they made on me.

Then there are those guys who are just as eager as I am to be in a relationship. When I meet this sort of guy, a committed relationship always happens, and we happily frolic in our love. That is, until I start seeing flaws in the guy and I ask myself if I had jumped into a relationship too soon, yet again. Then I start to think that maybe those people who called me a player were right all along.

As you can see, I am clearly conflicted when it comes to relationships, and I have come to the point where I have decided to accept that I am not yet ready for it. I’ve been chasing after love for too long already and I had let my life get shaped around my obsession with love too many times. Sure, love is indeed a beautiful thing, but there are too many beautiful things in life to be eclipsed solely by love.

That’s not to say that I’m giving up on love. No, that would be too melodramatic, even for me. I’m saying that I think I’ve been courting love the wrong way. In all my conquests, I’ve been following two fallacies: that I need love and that I have the right to be loved. Believing that I needed love has led me to chase everything that remotely resembled it. Believing that I had the right to be loved has given me unbearable pain whenever the love I gave was not given back. From now on, I will see love as a gift. Gifts are not something that you need to live, neither are they something that you can demand for.

I am not in love right now, but it’s okay. I’ll focus on all the other beautiful things in life. But if love does come for me again when I am ready, I will be grateful and I will appreciate it for what it is and for as long as I have it.