Love shouldn’t have to force you to lose your sense of self-respect.
Love was never designed to be easy. As they all say, it’s foolish to rush into a love especially when you assume that you don’t really have to work hard to sustain it. No love is going to ever survive without substantial effort. Love is always going to require a lot of patience, time, understanding, and dedication from the people involved. Love is always going to have to demand a lot from a person – both physically and emotionally – and it can get a little overwhelming at times. Love has the power to both energize and drain a person at the same time and that’s just one of the many paradoxes that love can bring to a person’s life. Love alone isn’t going to be enough to sustain a relationship and all experienced couples know that. Love is never going to be as easy as how they make it seem like in the movies and fairytale books. Love is always going to carry with it a fair share of trials and challenges that you and your partner are going to have to overcome together.
But love gets particularly difficult whenever it’s unrequited. Shakespeare wrote of this pain quite frequently and this message has resonated with the hearts of so many people because it’s quite a common phenomenon. So many people fall in love with people who don’t necessarily love them in return and that can be quite painful. But the chance to pursue a love that you think you deserve is always a chance that is worth taking – because love is always going to be worth the risk of pain and disappointment. Love is always going to be worth the pain of rejection. You should risk to lose a lot just to gain an ounce of love; but it’s always going to be worth it. You should always be willing to take a chance of love; it’s the one thing in this world that we should all be willing to take our chances on. And sometimes, love is going to force us to make a few adjustments here and there. Sometimes, in order to gain the affections of a person who is dear to us, we have to make a few compromises and that’s normal.
However, everything has its limits. And you should never be willing to compromise who you are just to get a person to fall in love with you. Because when you have to resort to fundamentally changing who you are as a person to win another’s love – then you have to know that that isn’t really true love. You are essentially killing your true self for the illusion of love and that’s just plainly unfortunate. True love shouldn’t have to mean that you must change who you are. True love doesn’t have to mean you giving up on the things that you’re most passionate about. True love doesn’t have to mean you giving up on your biggest dreams and goals. Love shouldn’t have to mean you completely losing your sense of self. That’s not what love is – it never has, and it never will be about that.
Love shouldn’t have to force you to lose your sense of self-respect. Love shouldn’t mean you giving up your sense of dignity. In fact, love should always push you to become the best possible version of yourself; but it shouldn’t be forcing you to become a different person entirely. If you feel like you have to change who you really are just to get a person to fall in love with you, then you are merely lying to yourself and to your partner. You are living a lie – and your love will be based on a falsehood. Your relationship will end up being built on an illusion – and eventually, all illusions fade away and your relationship will come crashing down.
It’s true. Love was never designed to be easy – nor will it ever be. But it shouldn’t have to be so hard either. Love should never be something that you should be killing yourself for. If you find yourself begging for a person to love you back, then you have to consider the possibility that perhaps things just aren’t meant to be. You have to learn how to detach yourself from a person if things just can’t work out. Love is never easy, but it should never have to be forced either. You can’t force or compel another person to fall in love with you because it just doesn’t work that way. You just have to accept that sometimes, love doesn’t work out the way that you want. That’s part of being mature. That’s part of growth. If someone doesn’t want to be in your life, you have to let that person go. Save your dignity. Have some self-respect. Don’t resort to groveling for something that you’re not destined to have. Pick yourself up and move on to things that are meant for you.