It’s Not About Finding Someone Who Makes Love ‘Easy,’ It’s About Finding Someone Challenging And Real

happy couple, couple forehead kiss, finding real love, love isn't easy
Kyle Head

It’s not about finding someone who makes love easy, who falls into rhythm with you, whose hands feel perfect in yours, who comes into your life and suddenly everything makes sense. It’s not about finding someone who always loves you just right, who never says or does anything wrong, who cares for you unconditionally, without a single doubt. It’s not about finding someone who never makes you question, or get frustrated, or wonder. Because that’s not love, that’s a fairytale.

The reality of love is messy, is complicated, is raw. There are moments when you don’t fit quite right, when you don’t see eye-to-eye, when you doubt or have trouble trusting or want nothing to do with each other and retreat to opposite corners of the room. The reality of love is that you will fall for an imperfect person, one who will let you down and maybe hurt your heart at times. The reality of love is that no one will love you fully and without fault, but they will try. You will both try.

See, it’s really not about finding a perfect person who makes love ‘easy’ because love isn’t meant to be easy.

Love is challenging. It’s two different people coming together and trying to agree on the same things, trying to tie their lives and perspectives together, trying to bend and make compromises and understand what the other is thinking, even when it’s hard. Loving someone is hard. It’s choosing someone even when they let you down, even when you’ve been conditioned to walk away, even when the rest of the world is falling in and out of these temporary commitments, even when the practical choice would be to simply let go.

Love is fighting. Fighting when you don’t agree. Fighting when you’re mad. Fighting when you want to walk away, and yet you still keep coming back. Fighting for one another, to be stronger than the day before.

Love is chaotic. It’s relearning who you are alongside someone else. It’s losing pieces and finding pieces of yourself in the arms of another person. It’s growing and shifting and accepting that you will never be the same two people, individual or together, and that’s what makes love so wonderful.

Love is knowing that you will grow and change and that this process is so hard, but so rewarding in the end.

Love is not searching for a flawless person, but embracing your mess, another’s mess, and the beautiful mess you can make together.

We think that we’re supposed to find a ‘perfect’ person, that we’re supposed to fall in this ‘happily-ever-after’ love that never lets us question or doubt. We think that one day we’ll fall into love and it will be everything we ever asked for. And in some ways it will, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy.

Yes, we’ll find love. Yes, it will be incredible and completely rock our world. Yes, it will show us what we’ve been missing and searching for all this time. But it will be challenging.

It will be learning to love someone who is just as frustrating and stubborn and selfish as we are. It will be accepting them for who they are, pushing to become better together, and finding ways to love one another, even when the world gets complicated.

Love isn’t meant to be simple. People aren’t meant to be easy. We’re supposed to have problems and obstacles and moments of discovery—because this is the purpose of life—to be forever growing. And when we find someone to grow with, we have to remember that it’s not about having this fairytale connection.

It’s about finding something real. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Marisa is a writer, poet, & editor. She is the author of Somewhere On A Highway, a poetry collection on self-discovery, growth, love, loss and the challenges of becoming.

Keep up with Marisa on Instagram, Twitter, Amazon and marisadonnelly.com

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