“I love him but I don’t trust him.” “I love him but love isn’t enough.” We’ve all been there; and if we haven’t, we’ve been there shamelessly pouring our girlfriends glasses of wine as they shift through these thoughts. The truth? Love, (when it is love) will always be enough. The second truth? Coming to this realization f*cking sucks.

I once found myself in this exact position. I could shout to the mountains how much I loved this particular boy but it was what I said in whispers that spoke loudest: I didn’t trust him, among other things of course. I felt like love was not enough for “us” because smaller issues seemed to consume my thoughts. Trust, the inability to compromise, and the lack of emotion I felt from him led me to this dark hole of excuses.

It took me a full year following the most earth-shattering heartbreak of my life to come to this conclusion: Love was enough. It was him that was not.

Many think that love is not the absolute factor when it comes to an intimate relationship with someone else. While a relationship is many things, love is the absolute factor.

Love is the umbrella that encompasses all other values: trust, compromise, responsibility, and honesty. Without love, all of these are things will fall apart. And surely, if all of these things are broken, do you really have love? Or is the love that may reside the type of love you want to build a life with?

These questions are scary, and it is far easier to say that the love you have with another person isn’t enough rather than list off the ways this person might just not be the one to invest your love in. Once you are with a person who brings out emotions, it may even be hard to admit this; but that doesn’t take away from the truth-value of these statements.

We love a person because they possess the same values as we do. We trust them. We find comfort in their words and actions; their actions positively affect our lives. And we see all of these values before we even think of loving this person. The trust and honesty and comfort comes before the love, so why do we allow the love to remain when the person loses the qualities that brought this love out of us? Why do we allow “love” to be the cop-out.

We, as people get so wrapped up in the love that we are willing to risk our moral standards to keep it. We are so invested we become irrational beings. Love is enough, but in the instances where we face the idea that love may not be enough, its simply just not love.

It can be so hard to detach yourself from a person long enough to recognize this and it may even take a broken heart to do so. However, once you understand this, you will thank yourself.