I hope someone loves me.
That's life encapsulated in one sentence. That someone changes throughout your life.
When you're born, you hope that your parents love you. You trust them implicitly like someone who has never experienced pain.
If you're lucky, you start with the purest love you'll feel in your life.
Growing up, you start caring about what your siblings and friends think. You want them to think you're cool. You want to feel included and accepted. You want to feel loved for the things you do and the person you are.
It's around this time you feel the first pangs of adolescent loneliness. You realize love isn't a guarantee. This scares the shit out of you—and rightly so.
Imagine discovering the one thing you want most in the world is actually rare. Everyone is searching for their own peace of mind and you're responsible for your own happiness.
You feel a cold chill when you realize there's a very real possibility of ending up with nothing. You think there's nothing more terrifying than spending a lifetime alone.
You learn becoming an adult means learning to hide it better.
Your dating life in your 20's feels like playing chicken with a series of partners to see who blinks first and ends up breaking the other person's heart.
Deep down, you realize everyone's playing an insane game of gambling with happiness. You don't want to admit how unhappy you are because it's uncool.
You worry that you'll never find someone who understands you—who you feel confident loves you for you. You worry about time running out. You worry that you're at your most attractive self today and it'll only get worse from here.
You may even think there's something defective about you. You look around and see happy couples everywhere and make the mistake thinking that love happens for the majority of people.
Once you do find someone, you wonder if this person is the one. You want to believe this person is perfect. You want to believe that you were lucky to end up with this person. You feel that gnawing anxiety of wondering if this is actually true. Are you settling because of the fear you'll end up with nobody?
Outwardly, you'll give the appearance that you know what you're doing—that you feel assured of the best kind of love coming your way. You smile with a tinge of sadness worrying about the future.
After a few years of marriage, you feel like you've mastered love. After all, you've stayed together when a number of your friends have gone through their first divorces. You no longer feel the anxiety of worrying if you're with the right person.
When talking to younger people, your voice fills with the gravitas of romantic wisdom as you grab your chin saying, "Oh, you'll learn. You'll learn."
Your complacency is destroyed when you hear the first cries of your child.
You find yourself tearing up realizing how powerless you are to that silly toothless grin. You feel naked. Even the nanoscopic possibility of losing your child makes you want to crawl into a fetal position.
As you look at her smiling in her sleep you realize there's nothing you wouldn't do to save her. You want to give your child the world.
It's your child's first day of school. You establish a routine. Time passes quickly as you give daily rides and your child progresses through the grades.
Suddenly graduation happens.
You've expected this day to come but nothing prepared you for that moment you peered into the empty room. It's that moment you realized you'll never see your child face-to-face on a daily basis again.
You realize that the first 18 years were a very special time that you got to spend so closely with someone you loved. You feel that pang of loneliness as you try to swallow that tennis-ball sized lump in your throat.
You tell yourself that letting go is part of maturity and is a process every parent goes through. That still doesn't stop the tears.
You hope for your children to visit you—at least call you once in a while. You hear the exasperated, "Yes, Mom. I need to go, Mom." You realize that your children have lives of their own and yet the ache still remains.
You try to fill your life with other things. You still find yourself missing the people you love very much.
Nobody told you life would be filled with so much pain. To think: you thought finding a boyfriend or girlfriend was hard.
In your decades of experience, you distill three unescapable truths about love:
- When you love someone, you give them the power to destroy you.
- When you die, you will inflict agonizing pain on the people who love you.
- We all still love because its what gives our lives meaning.
You think to yourself,
I hope someone loves me.