“…Baby don’t hurt me…” -Haddaway
Welp, that’s not true. Love certainly hurts at times.
Love is a many-splendored thing according to a 1955 autobiography turned film.
An Officer and a Gentleman tells us that love lifts us up where we belong, and according to The Beatles, all we need is love.
Well…I call bullshit.
Ironically, I am also a hopeless romantic.
When I was a small child, I learned that love was unpredictable, needed to be earned (but it wasn’t clear how), could be taken at any moment and for any reason, and couldn’t keep me safe.
I spent the rest of my youth and early adulthood hating myself for not being loveable. Wondering why no one would love me the way I loved them. I must have been much worse than I thought myself to be.
I believed that if I found someone who needed to be loved as much as I did, then I could give them what they’d been longing for and finally earn the love I’d been longing for my whole life.
I knew that I had a ton of love to give and I wanted to find the most broken of souls and use that love to glue the pieces of their heart back together. I longed to finish the task and be congratulated on a job well done. I wanted to be patted on the back for finally doing enough to…
