To the person I took way too long to call my boyfriend.
I will never fully understand how we came from me friend-zoning you to being a couple, but I do know that I wouldn’t change it for the world. We’ve been together for a couple of months now, so now it is time that I reveal to you why I have so many fears about us.
I spent a year and a half of high school and my first semester of college involved with a boy who was not good for me. And then one day he broke up with me. I should have been relieved, but I was crushed. He told me he had feelings for another girl. He had spent months making me feel holistically worthless: he destroyed my heart, my soul and my spirit by calling me horrible names, telling me that no one liked me, leaving me for another girl and telling me no one would ever love me like he did.
I’m sorry I get so upset when you try to play around when I want to kiss you — my kisses have just been rejected so many times by someone I thought I loved. You show love in a way I have never experienced, so I don’t always know how to accept it. You shower me with gifts to show your love, you offer to take me out to dinner when I’ve had a rough day and you listen to me without retaliation when I am ranting or am upset about something.
No one has ever been so patient with me or looked at me with as gentle of eyes as yours. You step up to the plate when I need you, often before I even admit that I need your help.
I don’t know how I was ever happy in my other relationships, because I realize now they were never good, happy relationships. They were horrible and destructive and they hurt me so deeply that it affected my life. But you — you affect me in an entirely other way. I now know what it is like to have a boyfriend care for me and to be loved on. And it is so … terrifying. I have only recently realized that I deserve to be treated well, but I often feel that I don’t deserve someone as amazing as you, either.
Everyone has left me, and I am terrified that you will leave me, just like they did, when you see in me whatever it was that caused them to leave. So please be patient with me when I get upset that you don’t kiss me enough or that we don’t spend enough time together or that we ate dinner in silence — I am just terrified that you are drifting away from me like so many others have.
All my love,
A Girl Who Finally Feels Loved
