I refuse to believe that you were my last happy ending. I refuse to believe that a high school love was all I get, all I deserve. I refuse to believe I don’t get a second chance to love again and to show how much I’ve changed, grown, and evolved. I refuse to believe you are the best I could ever have, because you’re not, and you never were. Lately you seem to be showing up randomly in my life. Facebook loves to remind me of my life five years ago. I, to this day, believe Timehop was the worst invention, the past is the past, let’s all agree to keep it that way. Even with this being so, I always do take a moment to think about it, to think about you. They say our first love will forever be the hardest, it’ll be the one we remember when we're old, when we’re searching for someone new, when we feel like giving up. When I hear all this, I want to yell bull shit on it all. Why do we allow one silly love to consume us? I was 18 when I met my first love and looking back, I’m not even sure if it was love. Can you be in love at 18? Do we even know what it is? No matter what it was, it was messy, and painful, and over before I even had the chance to figure out what it was. When you’re 18 years old, love is supposed to be fun and it was for a while, but high school is hard enough, add guys to the mix and it’s nearly impossible.

Lately I’ve been so engulfed with the idea of love and what it is. Men have really never found me the loving type. I’m the girl they love to want and love to leave. After a while I started to believe them. I started thinking maybe all I was, was someone’s drunk Saturday night, gone by dusk, never to be heard from again and for a while that was fun. I made my own rules, played the game of lust. Although lust is fun, lust is lonely. Lust doesn’t want to explore the city or laugh at your jokes. Lust doesn’t care about your family or think your laugh is cute. Lust adores your body but forgets to appreciate your mind. Lust is not enough.

Living in a city with millions of people, you would think meeting people would be easy. Endless men at your disposal, one of them has got to be the one right? Wrong. The more men I meet, the more defeated I feel. This city has some of the most intelligent, handsome, ambitious men I’ve ever met but it also has some of the slimiest, cruelest, heartless ones. And it’s funny, the good guys are either gay, taken, or emotionally unavailable.

The more I search for Mr. Right, the deeper I dig myself into a hole of disappointment. So, I’m trying to learn to love myself. Carrie Bradshaw said it best “Being single used to mean that nobody wanted you. Now it means you’re pretty sexy and you’re taking your time deciding how you want your life to be and who you want to spend it with.” Being single shouldn’t be a curse or something were ashamed of. There may never be a Mr. Right and we need to learn that that’s okay. Some of the best people I look up to are doing it on their own and that’s okay. When did we as women decide we need to be in love to be worth it? That being in love and having a man on our side was what defined us? Don’t get me wrong, men are great, sometimes more than great but I am tired of believing that I need to find my Mr. Right tomorrow. Although I am lonely, sometimes dangerously lonely I also know I am worth it. I know that the men I seek are never good enough because of my awful taste in men but I also know that one day, whenever that day comes, someone great will come along and I will understand why it took so long to find him. So for now I’m going to love myself, my friends, my family, my life. I have all this love built up in me, someone deserves it, so why not me? And lastly,
“Maybe some women aren’t meant to be tamed. Maybe they need to run free. Until they find someone, just as wild to run with.”