everything i've learned about love (youtube script)
Ever since I was a little girl, I have always been a hopeless romantic. I always wondered what it would be like to be loved by a prince, frolicking in a field of flowers wearing a whimsical white dress as he watched me from a distance picking flowers. I always dreamed of what it would feel like for someone to be fascinated by my mind, listening to every one of my thoughts and dreams. I daydreamed of being a mermaid, falling in love with a man, forbidden but united by our hearts. I dreamt about my first kiss, how it felt to be held by strong arms and the feeling of receiving flowers when getting picked up for your first date to the movies.
Call me a hopeless romantic bc I am, always reading teenage romance books on Wattpad and random romance novels I’d find at the library. There’s something about two people falling in love, changing each other for the better, and building a life that gets me giggling and squealing, and fluttering my heart as if I’m the main character. It increased my standards of romance, thinking love at first sight, is real and princes on white horses battling dragons were coming to save me.
My dreams of romance kept me hopeful, as any young girl would imagine, leading me to high school relationships that I thought were my world.
They were not.
I was heartbroken, discouraged, embarrassed, ashamed, angry. I felt my energy and soul getting sucked out of my body, leaving me with a desolate and empty void in my heart. These people that I had given my heart to were people that didn’t deserve me. They couldn’t feel my warmth, my love and all that I had to offer. I learned that people had to earn my love, earn my respect, earn my empathy. Giving myself up to people who didn’t appreciate me meant that I didn’t appreciate myself because I was desperately begging for someone to love me, despite the fact that they were wrong for me.
It wasn’t until my third year of college at UCSB that I met someone new. And for the first time in I was happy at where I was in my life.
The first time I saw him, he didn’t strike me in any way.
I hung out with his roommates for a couple of weekends before I met him. We bonded over many things- valuing family, genuine conversations, and having goals and aspirations for the future. He offers lenses to the world that I didn’t see before. He gave me new perspectives, new angles to look at, and new mindsets to think about. He asked many questions about me, wanting to get to know me and I felt a genuine, true pull to him even though I didn’t feel a spark when I first saw him.
As time went on we began to develop deep feelings for one another. I was attracted to his stable personality, his thoughtfulness, his ambitiousness, and his ability to provide. I liked that he didn’t talk much because that meant he was a good listener - which I really needed. And he was attracted to my liveliness, my talkative personality, my extrovertedness, and my compassion. He understood my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings, my moods. I sensed a feeling of calmness, stability, and safety whenever I was near him and I wanted to be around him more. I felt as if I could be my complete self without any judgment or criticism.
Being 350 miles away from each other is not easy. But I’ve learned that being physically close to someone doesn’t mean you love them more. Always talking and texting each other doesn’t mean you are emotionally closer. Relying on someone to make you happy and depending your emotions on their actions doesn’t mean you have a tighter bond.
I learned that love grows naturally. You don’t need to force it. Nature has it’s own way of uniting two people together and if two pounding hearts were really meant to be, both parties will make an effort to be in each other’s lives.
As someone who is extremely anxious, I learned that feeling insecurity and anxiety in a relationship means something might be wrong. Whether it’s your first relationship or not, feeling negative about someone in your life might be a sign that they were not the right one for you. Of course, relationships will not always be perfect. But if you are constantly thinking the worst of your partner, you are thinking the worst about yourself.
I learned that love is about the inner connection you have with your partner. The unspoken trust, the underlying attunement, the relief of safeness, like a breath of fresh air from the claustrophobic world.
I learned that love is about the other person. Learning that it’s about making the other person feel loved, learning how to support my partner, learning how to make them smile, even if they are a million miles away.
I learned that a relationship is not a substitute for happiness nor is it something to obsess over. It’s not a new hobby nor is it your life, but rather an addition to your life. It’s someone who adds color onto your canvas, someone who makes your life a little brighter, someone who supports and encourages your goals and your dreams. It’s not someone to brag about on Instagram or a trophy to show off on family Christmas dinners. But it’s someone who is made to be by your side in this life, someone to balance you and offer you all the parts you are missing. And you do the same for them.
It’s weird really, to meet someone who can bring calmness and relief to you instantly. I always dreamed of dating a tall, popular jock like in the movies or a funny, charming guy like John Cusack. But loving someone means truly loving yourself first and getting to know someone means getting to know yourself first.
And then slowly, you will know who is the right one for you.
I’m only 22, turning 23 this year and I still have so much to learn about love. Friendship love, familial love, pet love. And hey, I’ll always have dreams about love, handsome actors, princes, and whimsical dresses in flower fields.
But for now, I’ll enjoy what I have.
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