Love is Hard.

Love and life are both hard, but a life without love is simply empty.

And when I say that love is hard, I mean like, really hard.

Love can often feel like an encumbrance in the midst of heartbreak, tiring in the heat of misunderstanding and laborious when loneliness hits, but love is multifaceted, contrasting beautifully. It is not a game you win at, a goal you accomplish, or a milestone waiting to be met. Love requires patience knowing all your needs may not be met all the time and maintenance to keep a relationship in existence.

Love means adjusting your unwillingness to compromise and choosing someone, not just on their hardest days, but on yours as well.

There lies a difficulty within sharing yourself with another, a fear that you can never take it back, but a  heart that has never been allowed to love will eventually give up, stop trying, like a muscle unused. 

It is hard to walk someone into your garden and show them flowers you’ve kept guarded within iron gates, but it is just as hard to secretly want someone to tend to your flowers and to have them be seen, the same as to want love and not receive it.

If falling in love is hard, falling out of love really sucks. Unknowing every detail about another person that you thought you knew as well as yourself, creating a new routine that doesn’t involve sharing your morning coffee with them, re-envisioning a future where that’s not their side of the bed anymore, being okay with the silence of their absence- there is a weight carried in every aspect of love, including trying not to be in it.

Yes, we know love is hard, but anything difficult remains undoubtedly worth it. Complexity does not equal failure- it is how I define life, just complex. So, if you feel like you’re doing love wrong, you’re not. Love demands a lot from us,  in a lot of ways and when love feels heavy it only means that you are experiencing the shift of something powerful. Accepting love’s power, accelerates love’s process in a way that softens the hardness.

Any form of love performs its own trials, but part of peace is accepting the fact that love isn’t just a feeling, it is a decision. A decision made in every single moment of loving someone.