I grew up being terrified of the dark and of spiders. While I am still scared of spiders, despite knowing that they don’t really pose a dangerous risk to me, I am no longer afraid of the dark. I realized that when I was young, I wasn’t truly afraid of the dark, I was simply afraid of what it concealed from me. I was afraid of what might be hidden behind it, what might be a threat to me that was right in front of my eyes, yet I could not see it.
I suppose that is why I’m also afraid of falling in love. Falling in love is a somewhat common fear, even before Brooke Davis from One Tree Hill made it cool. I envy people who are able to have relationships easily and without worry. I envy people who, while they have the occasional concern about getting heartbroken, they are still able to be vulnerable, enjoying all that the relationship has to offer while it stands without worrying about a potential heartbreak. I envy those people so much, because for some reason, despite being in a relationship for two years, I have never been able to shake the all-consuming fear of getting my heart broken. My boyfriend used to question my hesitation near the beginning of our relationship, and my need for a certain amount of distance, as well as my refusal to drop the dreaded L bomb for months after he did, put quite the wrench in our romance. However, I got pretty good at explaining to him what my problem was when he asked as we sat in his bed and he told me he loved me, to which I replied, “thanks.”
I told him; it’s not that I don’t love you. In fact, it is the silence that I heard when I was sixteen on the other end of the last phone call I had ever had with my first love. That silence shook me to the very core. Following hanging up, I was hyperventilating and sobbing and screaming. I think that I stopped breathing a little when he left, I think a part of me sort of imploded. I think he may have taken my heart with him when he walked away and my chest was now empty, just a shattered mess. It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s the ripped measuring tape and the broken scale and the nights and months I had spent working out and starving after the boy I loved, told me he did not love me anymore. It is the way the light vanished from my eyes the second he was gone. It’s the endless crying, the cold tile of the bathroom floor, the box of his things and my pale face and dizziness. It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s the staying awake until the crack of dawn while I cried and fell to my closet floor because he left. I feel like the tears were stained onto my face for months. I think that when you love someone it never truly goes away. It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s the sleepless nights I had for weeks where I felt nothing but empty and got sick over my broken heart. I destroyed myself over it and even when I was okay again, I was never really okay. My hands still shook when they touched yours and I still flinched when you held me, something was still broken inside. Sometimes, when things break, you can’t fix them. Nothing ever goes back to how it was. My head was spinning too hard to make any rational decisions anymore. It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s that I do.
Call it what you want, I knew that wasn’t the most romantic way to tell my current boyfriend that I loved him for the very first time. But something about vocalizing my fear and what made it so real and scary for me actually helped me to accept it. I am afraid of love and I am afraid of heartbreak. I wish there was a magic cure for it, but there isn’t. I’m actually afraid that I’ll get married some day and still fear getting abandoned.
It hasn’t been only negative. My fear of getting my heart broken instilled a need for independence in me. It sparked a self-discovery journey that somewhat resembled Eat Pray Love only I didn’t get to travel the whole world. Rather, I learned how to love myself, which I think is the most important part. Loving yourself is what makes break ups a little more bearable, in my opinion. If you invest all of yourself into your partner, you feel totally shattered and broken when they leave because you were so invested. Taking a step back to figure out my needs and how to take care of myself has made me feel like my boyfriend, while very important to me, is not a necessity in my life. I think that there’s a difference between being unable to live without someone, and being able to live without someone but choosing not to. I can live without my boyfriend, but for right now, that’s not something I’m interested in doing.
The important part to me is that despite my crippling fear of getting my heartbroken, I didn’t shy away from a relationship with a wonderful guy who really loves me. I’m allowing myself to experience it, even if it scares me a lot. Should the day come that I get my heartbroken, I feel like my level of self-love is high enough that I would not completely lose myself. Only time will tell, I guess.