Love can be such a beautiful thing. Opening your heart to someone else, letting them in on all of your deepest secrets and fears. Always having someone to talk to, someone to rely on. It is beautiful and it is fun and it feels like all you ever wanted it to be.
But love can also be destructive. Love can change you, and not always for the better. Being in love with the wrong person, a person who was never meant for you but that you keep trying to hold on to, can destroy you in more ways than you realize. It can be painful, but sometimes we have to let go of the people we love in order to better both ourselves and the other person.
I believe that everyone has good in them, but sometimes they don’t show it. You can love them and you can fight for them with every part of your being, but in the end they won’t change. They won’t fight back, they won’t love you on the same deep level that you love them. Instead, they will cheat or lie or hurt you in any other way. Someone who does that is a person not deserving of your love. No matter how painful it is to admit, the two of you are not meant to be. Maybe you are too different, or maybe the timing just isn’t right. But no matter what the reason is, you can’t stop fighting for someone who is not going to change.
You can try for days and months and years, but in the end you can’t change another person. You can give them the benefit of the doubt, you can choose to forgive their actions, but know that you will never forget. Everything you are experiencing in the relationship will haunt you while you are still in it. Every little mistake, every teardrop, every fight, will be in the back of your mind and come up when you least expect it to. You can’t change the past, you can only decide to accept it.
But you shouldn’t have to.
You should never have to accept lying, cheating, violence, or any other hurtful action. Every couple can fight and hit rough patches and have difficult moments, but a couple who truly love each other will never hurt one another in that way. You should never be asked to accept anything but butterflies and smiles and all that is good. If a person can’t stay loyal and honest throughout a relationship, that person is not deserving of someone else’s love right now. You should never feel pain because your significant other treats you in a way you do not approve. That would never have happened if it was real love.
While caught up in a relationship, it is often easy to overlook these things. Love is blindness, tricking your mind to only see and feel the things you want to. Sometimes you need an impartial outside voice to tell you what you don’t want to tell yourself. So this is me telling you the words you sometimes find yourself whispering in the teary nights, but never saying out loud to anyone else.
This is your permission to let go.
This is your permission to move on. This is your chance to let go of what is not good enough, in order to find something that is. Just because you have experienced one failed relationship or two it does not mean you are a failure. And it does not mean there is not someone purely good for you out there. Somewhere around the world your future significant other is sitting right now, unaware of your future together. But you will never meet that person if you keep staying in your toxic relationship. It is time for you to stop fighting for a person who will never fight back. It is time for you to be happy.
Featured image via José Luis Photographer on Pexels
