“Cause I love you but I hated that me,
And I don’t wanna see that side again
But I’m sorry, Kim
More than you could ever comprehend
Leaving you was fucking harder than
sawing off a fucking body limb.”
– Bad Husband, Eminem.

Bra-fucking-vo Eminem, bra-fucking-vo.

I’ve been on the fence of “love.” We hear “love conquers all,” then we hear “love is not enough.” I used to be more on the “love conquers all” side, then after my experiences and finally snapping out of denial, I’m more on the “love is not enough” side.

When I love a person, I give my all. For real. I can bet my life and career, my ex’s, the person who might as well have been my boyfriend, would all tell you they never received the type of love I gave from anyone because that’s just how I am. That kind of sounded like I just loved all these people lol, but there were only 2. You think you’re in love especially when you have your first relationships when you’re young – but, you don’t really comprehend real love until you get older. Who knows, maybe when I’m in my 30’s I’ll look back and think, “wait, that wasn’t real love either.” Either way, I’m a cancer – loving, emotional, blah blah, that’s me.

Anyway, love is not enough. Yes, you should be able to overcome anything, through thick and thin, whatever – but not when it’s unhealthy. Not when it brings the worst out of you. Not when it brings a version of you that you are not proud of when you look at yourself in the mirror.

It was weird. In a previous relationship it got so bad we both thought, “there is no way this is love.” It was to a point that we both agreed we loved each other way too much that we didn’t want to just let it go. It was an unhealthy love. We loved each other, but it was so incredibly unhealthy at the end that it wasn’t that we didn’t love each other, it’s just that too much damage was done – It wasn’t right for either one of us given the circumstances, and different paths we were on.

Then I experienced love with someone that came with everything I wanted in a person. It was all too real, it didn’t make sense. We even joked about how we could never go to Vegas because we’d probably come back married. But, that too had to end because he knew he couldn’t give me what I really wanted and deserved at the end of the day. He told me how much he wished he could, when honestly, we both knew deep down he could whether we said it out loud or not – He was just afraid to ruin it, which I understood and respected.

It took a couple heartbreaks, but that’s what taught me that love is NOT enough. No matter how much you love a person, it’s not enough when it comes at the expense of your wants and needs, and there’s a fine line between compromise and sacrifice. You will never find a person or relationship that is perfect, and if you think you have, it’s not real because one of you is pretending to be someone you’re not – It’s IMPOSSIBLE to find a perfect person or perfect relationship.

It’s sad and hard to walk away from a person you have so much unconditional love for, but sometimes you have to love people from a distance. It doesn’t mean your bad people, it doesn’t mean it was one person’s fault more than the other, it just means you weren’t meant to be together – whether that be in the moment or ever.