It took a long time, but a couple years ago I had the hardest time loving someone. For various reasons. I won’t go into most of them, but there is one I feel like I venting about right now. The idea of a single love. I’ve carried a bit of what I used to feel with me since then, but for the most part, I guess you can say I’ve adapted. One of my problems with being in relationships in the past was I was firm in the belief that you could love numerous people at the same time. I say this, yet this isn’t what I would have said back then, I’d have said that I couldn’t understand what love was. The reason being, I felt like I was able to fall in love with so many people, but looking back I can say, fairly certainly that I was just unable to understand that the emotions I felt towards multiple people were the same sort of love. I had various depths of love and affection towards different people, but for the most part, I see I could have fallen in love, to the same degree, with multiple people, had it not been for the fact that I was taught via negative reinforcement, failing in relationships, that it wasn’t normal to love more than one person at a time.
So now it’s common for me to say, I love all people in the same way, just to different extents. Don’t get me wrong, I love the way people expect me to now, one at a time, but sometimes it makes me feel empty. I have more love inside me than I’m used to, in fact, sometimes I feel like I’ve changed a major part of who I am and it hurts. Other times I wonder if maybe I was just being naive. It’s so hard to tell sometimes whether you’re right about a trait you used to have, whether it was a part of who you really are or just a “phase” for lack of a better word. I might never know, but sometimes I used to wish it was okay to love more than one person. Not just because it would make things less complicated, but because then I wouldn’t have to worry about mucking things up and could care for people in whatever way I felt I did. It’s hard for me to explain, because I’m so used to just caring for one person now, it’s hard for me to adequately explain what I used to feel.
