this is going to hurt

pov: you're a lover girl dating the emotionally avoidant

I’ve always been the type of person to go running, head first, straight into love. A romantic to a fault.

Even if that love was surrounded by a brick wall, covered by a slab of concrete, and enclosed in a sheet of metal. Knowing that I’m about to slam headfirst into an immovable object, nothing about that has ever frightened me. Relationships have never scared me. Letting someone in enough to know that this could hurt me one day was never something that I shied away from. Unfortunately (I think?), it comes naturally.

Now that I’m dating and encountering all sorts of men and I’m using apps as a woman who was born a lifetime ago when they didn’t even exist, the question I constantly come back to is, what is everyone so afraid of?

Casual, FWB, situationships - lots of words to assign meaning to things that are supposed to be completely meaningless (to at least one person), but the whole nature of a relationship to me, no matter how casual, is that you can’t help but relate to one another? 

We’re desperate for closeness and intimacy in any way we can obtain it but don’t ever want to take responsibility for the fact that we can and will hurt one another.

Somehow, using every other possible word other than relationship somehow absolves us from any obligations to one another, and most importantly, guilt.

Isn’t it human nature to let each other down? Don’t we all fall at the same hurdles? 

I don’t think I’ve ever entered into any relationship not totally terrified about how it was going to emotionally tear me apart - no matter how long it may last. And these days, they don’t last very long. 

I understand the worry, I understand the fear. The pain of another relationship ending can be utterly excruciating. The guilt of causing that pain is also hard to sit with. It’s easy to shut down, it’s easy to be closed off, keep people at arm’s length. 

But the best thing about my relationships, however long any of them have lasted, is that they’ve been expansive. They’ve reminded me that the love I have is abundant. It grows. It’s not hard, it can’t be chipped away at, or taken from.

I don’t go into every relationship expecting to be hurt or disappointed. But I know that things can end, whether or not I want them to. I know that I can’t control people, or their feelings. The outcome was never in my hands.

In fact, in spite of all the evidence and all the experience, I live in hope. It’s all I have left.

Moments by Mary Oliver (2016)

---

I made the silly mistake of searching for something in my WhatsApp.

You know when you just innocuously type in a word that suddenly brings up old conversations with people you no longer speak to - people whose names bring up a sinking feeling, or a sharp pinch, or make you hold your breath for a little too long.

The breakup text between myself and my ex-boyfriend popped up as a lovely reminder to myself that I should not send paragraphs on WhatsApp ever again (although in fairness, we were long distance so it felt like the best way to convey my feelings at the time), and that what I had listed out to him were things that I was looking for in a relationship.

I want vulnerability and openness.

I want romance in gestures and mundanity.
I want enthusiasm, especially about the future.

I want curiosity, about me and my life and my dreams.
I want care and attention.

I want friendship.
I want support.
I want effort.
I want kindness. 

Reading it back in this way is making me feel as sick as I felt when I sent it, but ultimately, it all remains true. It’s as true as when I’d said it two years ago, and it’s true now.

A lot of the rhetoric around single people is that they are desperate for romantic partnership, but I was in a relationship with someone who couldn’t give me a single one of those things I’d written above, even when I outrightly asked. 

At the time, when in not so many words he told me that he couldn’t give me what I wanted, I was so devastated. I couldn’t understand how someone who said that they loved me couldn’t even muster up enough courage to be my friend. And this is a man who has known me for a very long time.

But I finally recognised how much fear made him feel stuck. Despite how much he loved me, I was still an unknown variable in his life. I could change, he could certainly change. The potential for emotional upheaval becomes high when you are two people in a relationship. And he was unwilling to take that risk.

There is a lot more to this story, his and mine, than I could possibly convey here but I did learn in this how much fear keeps us small. It closes the door to so many routes we could’ve taken. It makes us believe we don’t deserve good things, or that these beautiful relationships are only reserved for certain people, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Human beings are messy and imperfect. We hurt ourselves and each other, stumbling around trying to make these things work, and we deserve the love and the relationships that we want. 

Stand up. Be brave.

---

About me: I'm Nicole, the writer of The Noteworthy. I’m also a content creator and the co-host of the award-winning Mixed Up podcast. Having been chronically online since the age of 13, you can also find me on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Pinterest. I’m working on my first book, The Half Of It, which you can pre-order here.

---