One of the most popular writing topics is love. Rightfully so, because love is indescribable. That’s why so many authors have so many versions and stories. Love stories, fairytales, fiction and non-fiction sends you reading through each chapter, and feeling your heart warm to instances of when the guy finally tells the girl he loves her, or when someone loves someone else so much they let them go, and the tears roll down your face, hitting the open pages of the book. You tell yourself, “I want a love like that.”

We are all the authors of our own love stories. Some authors write stories that consist of one chapter, because your first love becomes your only love. Or there are the authors whose stories consist of various chapters, more than one book or even a series. Within those chapters, stories or even your series, you fall in love more than once, encounter many heartbreaks or disappointments. But one thing I hope all love stories conclude in is finding a love that was worth the wait.

I am a hopeless romantic. I love love. I love everything about it: the process of falling in love, being in love, striving to fight for that love, even the lessons taught if that love fails. It’s a beautiful, and sometimes, tragic thing.

People nowadays seem to say that the love seen in movies or read about in books doesn’t happen. It’s fake and/or unrealistic. But I think you’re wrong. The truest love of your life, the person you’re meant to be with, the person who is your person, will outshine any story or movie you could ever read or watch.

I think people ruin and destroy the beauty of love because we are so quick to punish love for past experiences, or we are fearful to let someone come into your life with the potential to hurt you. But that’s what love is all about: taking risks, being scared and taking a leap of faith, because you never know how great, or sometimes not-so-great, it could turn out to be.

My book entails the times I’ve been cheated on, lied to, left feeling like I wasn’t good enough and disappointed, because everything he said he wasn’t going to do he did. Throughout those times, I have had a strong armor around my heart, blocking anyone from even attempting to try and take it down. I have cried many tears, I have written many journal entries of why it had to happen to me and I have sang at the top of my lungs songs that made me feel that I wasn’t as alone as I felt.

But you know what I did? I still believed in love, all that it could be, should be. What I read in books I craved, what I saw in movies I knew I would find. I refused to believe that people couldn’t feel what we see on the big screen or read in a love story. I may have, at the time, not known that it was out there and I was just holding onto this hope that it did exist.

But it did exist. It existed in ways I didn’t think it could it exist. Sitting here today, looking back, I have had some of the greatest memories that deserve to be on the big screen; I have felt the feelings that deserve to be written about. Sure, some of those memories and feelings were followed by heart-wrenching ones, but at least I can say I’ve felt them and lived through those experiences.

I think that there is more than one “the one” out there for you. It comes down to timing, if this person is willing to treat you the way you should be. But if it isn’t the right timing, if they don’t treat you the way you should be treated, then continue writing. Because one day, you will write the chapter where the timing is right and the right one will stumble into your conclusion. But until then, consider yourself lucky to have been a witness of love many times throughout your life.

Authors take you through a roller coaster of emotions and plot twists, a beginning, middle and an end that made you unable to put the book down because you had to know how it ended. Being the author of my own story, as you are the author of your own, I know that we are on the same roller coaster, unable to put the pen down, frantically writing to see how it ends.

So from writer to writer, here is what I think of you: To put your heart on the line, time and time again, is true strength. To never give up on love is courage. The neverending search of finding a love that deserves you is wisdom. With your strength, courage and wisdom, you should find that you love yourself enough to never settle, to choose your love every day instead of running away from it, to know what you deserve and never stopping until you get it. To not punish your new encounters of love because of your past. Look back at your past and be grateful that yes, you may have experienced pain and heartbreak, but your story isn’t over. Never stop writing.

Imagine a time where you no longer are writing your story of “finding love,” but rather you have found love---and you are writing about what happens once you have found it.