heart – Rosie Culture

Every Love Is Different

I think it’s pretty safe to say that love is the most complicated emotion. We’re never actually sure if we’re feeling it. It can be paired with hate or obsession or resentment. It can be overwhelming, consuming, and confusing.

Every love we ever encounter is different. The way you love your family is a bond. The way you love your friends can be similar to your family. The way you were in love in your first relationship can never be identically mimicked in your next.

And then you get confused, because this love doesn’t feel like your last love. This love doesn’t feel like anything you’ve ever felt before so how do you even know it’s love?

How do you know that you love someone? How do you know if someone is the love of your life? You can try to base it off experience, but chances are it won’t get you very far. Because every love is different.

Love comes with questions. All you can do is try and go with the flow, accept the fact that you’ve never felt this way before and you may never feel this way again. Don’t make comparisons constantly, because the way you feel now will never match up to the way you felt before when it comes to love. Sure, there will be tiny similarities. And those similarities will help guide you to knowing whether you’re in love or not.

But in the end, we just have to trust our heart. Which is the scariest thing to do when it can end up broken. Love isn’t always rational, clear, and concise. It is messy and blurry and a whirlwind of different emotions mushed up into one. But that’s what makes it great.

photo by: https://www.flickr.com/photos/130461777@N07/

Relationships

Being In Love Vs. Being Comfortable

Relationships are hard for a number of reasons. They involve two people, each who has their own thoughts, feelings, and complicated structure. Two people that are trying to melt their lives into one. To have one set of thoughts, feelings, and one single complicated structure.

Sometimes it can be hard to find the person that’s right for you. Sometimes it can be so easy to fall in love. But the beginning of a relationship is rarely the hard part – the months and years and rest of your life that follows is the hard part.

You have to be so self aware. You have to constantly know how you’re feeling and how to talk about it so it doesn’t get in the way of anything. When you lose your self awareness and settle into the relationship bed you’ve made, problems can’t be identified anymore. You can’t see happiness or sadness or jealousy or rage. You just see your relationship and it is what it is.

Are you still in love or are you just comfortable? Sure, you can’t picture your life without him but that’s only because you’ve spent so much time with him. Because you have structured your life around another person and have become painfully unaware of your own feelings.

Do you stick out the fights, the jealousy, the unhappiness because you’re in love? Love does not have to be pain, in fact it should be the one thing that makes you feel better when it’s recipricoted.

This relationship may be your norm now, but it wasn’t always this way. And if you step back and take a good hard look at your feelings and your relationship, you’ll be able to see if it’s worth fighting for. You’ll be able to see if you’re in love or just comfortable.

photo by: https://www.flickr.com/photos/f_lynx/

Relationships

Why New Love Is Terrifying

Are you dating? Are you in a new relationship? Are you scared? You should be.

There are different types of fears you face when you’re falling into a new love.

There’s the fear of getting your heart broken again. This fear will paralyze you, could possibly stop the whole relationship in its tracks because you’re so scared of feeling that hurt again.

There’s the fear of the unknown. Where are you going to go from here? Will I screw it up? Will someone else screw it up? Will we get married?

There’s the fear of this overwhelming feeling. Love is such a consuming addiction, the feeling of being so head over heels for someone is scary.

There’s the fear of hurting someone. Of not living up to their expectations or not being able to make it work the way they want.

New love is terrifying, but it’s okay. With that fear comes a whole world of excitement. You have to trust people, you have to trust yourself. Because even though you’re terrified, you’re one step closer to happiness with someone else.

Your head is scared, your heart is not. If you don’t do the things that scare you, you’ll be missing out on a lot of things in life. A lot of things that could potentially make you happy.

Give it a shot. Your heart might get broken again, you might not live up to expectations, you might be lost in the dark, or totally overwhelmed. But all of those lessons will help you in life – whether the love ends up being positive or negative. Trust the feeling and go where life takes you, dive into love despite the fear.

photo by: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sugarhiccuphiccup/

Break Ups

Getting Hurt vs. Hurting Someone

No one wants to get hurt. No one wants to put their heart on the line when there’s a possibility of it getting smashed. Unanimously, we can all agree that we do not want our hearts broken.

But when it comes to breaking someone else’s heart, there is so much less thought put into it. We are so concerned with protecting ourselves that we forget that there are other people who matter.

And while most people fear getting hurt, I fear hurting someone. I think I’ve felt heartbreak hard enough that it doesn’t bother me anymore. I put my love slowly into situations, I’ve learned how to escape without any cuts or bruises. But the thought of emotionally hurting someone else is terrifying to me. I don’t just tip toe into relationships for myself, but I do it for my partner.

Because if you’ve ever been on the giving side of a break up, you know that it sucks. You never wanted to let someone down. You feel like you’re letting yourself down.

So when the next possibility of a relationship arrives, you don’t want to let them down either. You keep your guard up, in hopes that they’ll keep their guard up too. Because if you don’t let them in all the way, maybe you won’t disappoint them. Maybe you won’t emotionally hurt them, too.

To the point where you would rather feel heartbreak all over again than feel yourself breaking someone’s heart. Getting hurt is never fun, but hurting someone else is a whole other feeling.

photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/dpangandoyon/

PostGrad

How To Reconnect With Old Friends

Losing friends is a part of life. With any relationship, sometimes people just get distanced from each other. They fight, they grow apart, they move, they let something get in the way.

But just because you lose touch for a little while doesn’t mean you’re meant to stay apart forever. We all have some friends that we left in the past because they were just not good for us. But we all also have friends we left in the past that need to be brought into the present.

It’s not easy to reach out to people you’ve lost touch with. So much time has passed, it seems a little awkward to ask someone how they’ve been doing for the last five years. But you had a great friendship before and there’s no reason to not have it again.

You have to forgive anything that may have happened in the past. Whether it be a fight, or they stopped keeping in contact with you no matter how hard you tried, or you just haven’t made the time to see them in 10 years. You have to forgive it all. If you’re willing to rekindle the friendship, any bad blood from the past needs to be obsolete.

And you need to be open. Your friends have grown into different people just as you have. Deep down we still have parts of us that stay the same, but those are the parts you just don’t give away to people. You have to be open to the new person your friend has become.

Lastly, you need to be patient. Friendships don’t grow overnight. It’s been so long that this friendship is basically starting from the beginning. You aren’t going to hang out every day and be best buds right away. It takes time, just like it did the first time around.

It is totally worth it to reconnect with old friends who are worth your time. Don’t waste your time on the ones who weren’t really good friends, but do spend the time with the ones who have always cared. Don’t be afraid to reach out, the special people in your life are hard to come by.

photo by: https://www.flickr.com/photos/47476117@N04/

Break Ups

I’m Glad It Didn’t Work Out Part 6

The last part of the series – and my favorite. A series of apologies and relationships that just didn’t work out, click here for part 1, click here for part 2, click here for part 3, click here for part 4, click here for part 5.

I am overjoyed, ecstatic, and unbearably happy that it did not work out. It’s petty and it’s bitter to speak poorly about your exes, but I’ll gladly take those words from anyone in order to explain how it felt when you broke up with me.

You are the worst person I know. You’re really not a person at all. You jump from relationship to relationship in order to grasp pieces of yourself from the people you date. You are extremely incapable of being alone and in that sense I consider you weak. You were trying to make me weak, too.

You tricked me, took advantage of me, made me believe beautiful things, then left me in the dark. You strung me along for years. I repeatedly tried to get out of it and you repeatedly guilted me into staying. I know you were never faithful as I was. Just as you weren’t in your past relationships, just as you are and will be in your future relationships. Being unfaithful does not always include physical cheating, but you take advantage of that fine line.

I fell in love with you because I thought you were just like me. Finally someone understood and finally someone thought I was pretty and finally someone liked me. But you were just molding yourself to fit me. You were just consuming the attention of the first person who gave it to you. And you did the same exact thing when we “broke up”, but with another victim.

Maybe we should talk about that. How you never actually broke up with me. Or how you never had the courage to say no to me. You always lead me on by saying “maybe” in order to disappoint me time and time and again. I’m sure there were good times, but I really just think I was feigning happiness because that’s what I was supposed to do. That is how I thought relationships were supposed to work. We were going to be with each other for the rest of our lives so it was okay that I had underlying unhappiness.

I am so glad it didn’t work out because I am capable of being alone. I am not weak. And your cowardice brought the unhappiness that I was trying to hide in our relationship out in the open. Clear to see. In a way, I’m glad we dated because I am a different person now. But in another way, I wish I had never had met you. You wasted my time, you wasted my emotions. All I can say is I hope one day you own up to the awful way you’ve treated people, not just me. I hope you own up to yourself because I truly do not care and do not wish for another half hearted apology from you. A puppy dog face that tries to make someone feel like it’s not your fault, but their own. I stopped buying it the moment you stopped trying to fit into my mold. I own up to my mistakes now. I have owned up to myself. I’m not weak, I’m not a coward, and I’m glad that we didn’t work out.

photo by: https://www.flickr.com/photos/james_sickmind/

Hook Ups

Loving Someone Who Doesn’t Love You Back

We tend to shield ourselves from pain before anything can really happen, therefore it’s not an every day occasion where we let ourselves fall in love. Especially if we know the person we’re falling in love with doesn’t love us back.

It’s just human nature to avoid the situation all together when you know it’s happening. This person has made it clear they don’t want to be with you – for any number of reasons. They just got out of a relationship, they see you as more of a friend, it’s just not the right time. When this happens you have two choices to make.

1. Stick around and hope realllllly hard you can be just friends.

Maybe the occasional cuddling and movie watching won’t affect you. Maybe you can be friends with benefits. The emotions could just stop here and all will be well.

2. Run like hell.

You KNOW you’re going to fall in love with this person. Their touch makes your skin burn and you wait by your phone all day for their texts.

Sometimes, we choose to stick around because it’s just so hard to let go of this person we’ve become so attached to. They always end up breaking our hearts. You think that maybe since you can’t be casual, you can make them love you back. You can be all that they want you to be and eventually they’ll have no choice but to love you and live happily ever after.

That rarely happens. It usually ends in you growing bitter towards the person, toward someone you love, which just ends up in a boiling hatred that is paired with an unrequited love. It’s a pretty awful feeling.

And if you run? Delete them on all forms of social media, ignore them in person, talk shit on them to all of your friends. Do you think it will make you feel better?

It probably will for a little while, but with anything you love, you will always carry a piece of them with you. What hurts the most is, while that person piggybacks on your heart for the rest of your life, you’re merely just someone they cared about for a little while and then left. To them, you’re gone and to you, they are forever.

photo by: https://www.flickr.com/photos/micurs/