When loving is as easy as breathing

Do you think you could survive without love? Without another person ever showing interest in you again? Without the feeling of someone tracing circles on your skin as you lay together, or seeing their eyes light up when you walk into the room? Do you believe there’s more for you beyond that?

Because you love the hours spent talking endlessly with your best friends. You love sitting on the porch when it rains, contemplating life’s hardest questions. You love curling up with a book and losing yourself in someone else’s creation. You love the soft breeze of spring and the first cup of coffee on a crisp fall morning. There’s so much you love and all of it is incredibly beautiful.

But nothing quite compares, at least for you, to being in love. From that very first moment of nervous anticipation, wondering if they like you too, sending your heart into a frenzy when their name lights up your phone. To the nights after a long, exhausting day, when you stand under a warm shower together, washing away the weight of the world, and lay so close that you hope your body heat and soft kisses can soothe their worries.

Some days, you wish you could turn it off. You wish you could let go of the hopeless romantic in you, the one whose heart aches for something deeper. You wish you didn’t long for strong arms to hold you, to push away the darkness even for a moment. You wish you could break free from the cycle of searching, of hoping, of believing that kind of love is still out there.

But on other days, you are so damn proud of your heart. Proud that you haven’t given up, no matter how reckless or futile others might think your hope is. Proud that you have the capacity to love so deeply, so relentlessly. You honor the way your heart refuses to stay broken, how it pieces itself back together time and time again. You are grateful for the softness that surrounds the love you give, for the way you love without limits, without hesitation. And that, in itself, is something truly rare.

The part you don’t want to admit—the vulnerability of it all—is that you feel like you were made to love. You live up to it in so many other ways, but there’s always a piece of you that feels missing when you’re not in love. You don’t know what that means or what it says about you, but it’s the truth. You feel most aligned when you’re giving and receiving romantic love, as if you’re sitting in the sunshine on a soft spring day, with the world finally making sense, if only for a moment.