You open Instagram. There they are again: the soft-lit selfies of happy couples holding hands in cafés you can’t afford, kissing on beaches you can’t get to, captioned with quotes about “finding your forever.” You scroll faster, but it’s everywhere. Apparently, everyone is madly in love except you. Maybe you’ve just been dumped. Maybe you’ve been single so long you’re…
I’ve been in love enough times to know it’s not always candlelight and slow dances. Sometimes it’s betrayal in the form of a text. Sometimes it’s silence where there used to be warmth. And sometimes it’s watching someone choose someone else while you’re still holding all the memories. When it happened to me — the breakup, the rejection, the slow…
“It’s not my fault that I shine brighter than you, but for the sake of our relationship, I will try to shine less.” Later, I finally understood that not only did my partner NEVER appreciate my efforts to support him by stroking his ego and sacrificing mine, he also felt more pitiful because my self-sacrifice only made him see…
I was so lonely that I settled for less. I tricked myself into thinking that even poor treatment is OK as long as I am not alone. Perhaps this is all I deserve now. Does this sound familiar? This a situation where someone’s intense desire for a relationship distorts their perception of reality, much like the psychological manipulation known…
We see the phrase “you are seen, you are heard, you matter” everywhere in social media now. But do we really know how it feels? I do. For so long, I’ve been a ghost. A flicker in the background, a fleeting image in the periphery of people’s lives. Nobody really looked, did they? They saw a facade, a veneer of…
What does forever mean in words of yearning? It means I believe in the promise of tomorrow, in the idea that life with you will be full of more surprises than I can imagine. Forever to me is like a book with blank pages, waiting to be filled with the stories we’ll write together. I see a future where we…
Sometimes, late at night, I find myself staring at the ceiling, wrestling with a swirling vortex of thoughts that refuse to be tamed. Isn’t that the case for so many of us? My mind clings to one haunting question: What would it take for you to just let go and embrace the love I’m offering? Why is love such a…