It makes your palm sweat, heart palpitate, takes space in your mind, and changes you for hopefully the better. What is this sensational experience? It’s called love. It can be one of the scariest but also one of the most exciting experiences you can ever indulge in. Relationships are not always easy, however. They take a lot of time, effort, energy, and even change. They require both sides to allow for acceptance and understanding which can mean anything from not judging their taste in music to understanding their point of view. Understanding your S.O. is crucial because it means allowing another person to be in your life because suddenly you’re not the center of it anymore. It is scary but incredible in a scary way. While becoming vulnerable with another human being doesn’t always come easily, it’s an amazing feeling to know that you are not doing it alone. However, when you find the right person it feels right. There’s a pang in your heart that just screams that it’s right at you. No matter how hard you try to silence it, it is always going to be there for as long as you love the person. If you are truly in love with another person, you know it because it’s an intrusive and demanding thought. It’s not able to be helped either. Once you feel love, you can’t fight it no matter how hard you try. You can learn to shove it down and live with it, but deep down inside it’s there and hopes to be valued.

Valuing another person requires recognizing why they are valuable and how you are able to do this. You value their perfections and imperfections so that there is no part of them that you don’t want in your life. You either accept them fully or not at all, but love can’t be half-hearted. It must be crazy and something that you jump into because you can’t help yourself. Sean McGuire (Robin Williams) in Good Will Hunting explained how he loved his wife’s imperfections despite what other people might’ve thought, “People call those imperfections, but no, that’s the good stuff”. You can’t pick and choose what you love about a person because love doesn’t have any prerequisites or checkboxes. Why someone falls in love in the first place is unknown, but oftentimes it is to someone you wouldn’t ever expect it would be.

However, love is by no means easy. Love takes hard work and determination in order for it to work. “Falling out of love” means the love wasn’t maintained or had changed too drastically in order for it to be honored properly. We are all supposed to grow together with our loved one but sometimes it doesn’t coincide with what both sides had expected. To learn to love the unexpected is a key factor in understanding the fluidity of life. In Juno, Mac McGuff had said “In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find someone who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you”. Find someone who loves you at all stages of your life because you’re never going to be 100% the best you but you’re also never going to be 100% the worst you either. It takes work to love the whole person, but you aren’t able to unless you truly have fallen for them deeply and magically. Unconditional love means loving someone at all points in life, no matter what they are like that day. But you must choose wisely because you can’t allow yourself to fall for someone that is unhealthy or would hurt you time and time again.

Growing up with divorced parents, I had to learn how to love in a healthy and trusting manner. That meant I had to let another person into my life and I had to trust that they were good for me. No matter how hard I tried to push my boyfriend out of my life, I couldn’t and I ended up hurting both of us. Does that mean I am the unhealthy one? The answer to that I have concluded is that my behavior was damaging but my heart was in the right place which meant I had to change my behavior to match what my heart wanted. It wasn’t fair to either of us for me to sabotage ourselves just because I was terrified of trusting and letting another individual into my life. It took me a long time to be able to trust my boyfriend especially after the previous boyfriends I had that were not good for me. I always felt comfort in the chaos and the hurt because that was all I knew growing up. At times, I wonder if my parents had gotten divorced earlier on then I would have ended up differently. However, the task now is to recognize when my parent's history is living through me so I can stop myself from doing the same thing. I wasn’t even looking for a relationship but when you find the right person they easily make it worth the hard work and fear. They have to be because I deserve a good relationship that I don’t mess up due to my own insecurities or fear. That is why love has always been hard for me to see clearly. I always saw love as fighting and hurting one another. However, I had to train my brain to change the way I saw it so that I didn’t end up hurting not just me but the other person as well.

Love had always been my biggest fear. Becoming vulnerable with another soul was always an option that I didn’t look for in life. It was always easier for me to shove out those that were close to me because I would’ve rather hurt them before they hurt me. But life isn’t games. Life is precious and deserves attention and value. This means that there have to be times where you fall head over heels without stopping yourself because you deserve to experience that. It isn’t easy, but when you find the right person it’s completely worthwhile.