Can You Lose The Ability To Fall In Love?

Little girls grow up watching fairytales.  They see prince charming saving the princess and ultimately think that something like that will happen to them one day.

As a young teenager, we think having a boyfriend will solve all of our problems.  We want to have our first kiss and fill the gap in our hearts that we’ve been filling with angsty music and not-so-real reality tv.

I fell in love (using this term loosely because who the hell knows if I was in love or not) when I was 16 and really did think it solved all of my problems. My relationship got me through my weird high school years of not so great friends and not so close family.  It got me through my first very scary year of college. It definitely did not solve all of my problems.

I fell out of love (again, loosely) over a year ago. And I have felt nothing of the sort ever since.

People will say that after a break up, you need to go through your rebound phase and get everything out of your system before you can consider a relationship again. Then, you just need to find the right person and everything will fall into place.

I never thought finding the right person would be so hard. I did the rebound phase and kind of, sort of, tried to seriously date but I could never get myself to stay around long enough.

We all make excuses.  I’m in college and now isn’t the right time.  I just got out of a relationship and now isn’t the right time. I’m still young and graduated and now isn’t the right time.

Are they all just excuses for the fact that you can lose the ability to fall in love after getting your heart broken?  Even if you close your eyes and believe really hard that a fairytale ending is coming your way – what if you already lost all of that princess spark inside of you that was going to make that possible.