Finding the Courage to Love

How many times have you felt that you met the right person at the right time… but you still had trouble accepting their love or maybe you had trouble with showing love, to the point where that relationship could rise out of the “friend-zone”, or from just dating, and onto the next level. When I was growing up and maturing, I really didn’t have trouble meeting people and establishing relationships with people, that part was always easy for me. However, what took a long time for me to do, was to find the courage to open up and communicate my love. I remember having to practice saying, “I love you.”, because I never really said it openly and I didn’t hear people saying it to me.

There are a lot of things that will make or break a relationship, or things that will even hinder it from really starting. One of the most important things that a person, who’s looking for a relationship, needs to be able to do is… TRUST. The foundation of any good relationship has trust embedded in it, with love being the yeast that makes it grow, and attraction being the powdered sugar that makes it sweet 🙂 .

In a past intimate relationship, I was in a situation with my girlfriend that really took me by surprise. Though at the time, I had my life in order financially, and I was very mature and confident in the eyes of men… nevertheless I was very inexperienced in being in an intimate relationship, and immature in handling conflicts and disagreements. One night, we were in my room talking like normal, and she said something I’ll never forget, she said, “Jason, I feel like you are going to break up with me.”, I told her, “No.. why do you think that?” And I kept telling her that I loved her, and it never crossed my mind that I felt like ending our relationship. However, she just didn’t believe me…. and my words of encouragement just weren’t received. It finally came to a point to where I told her that if you feel so strongly that I’m going to break up with you, then it must be true.

That night was the last night I ever spoke to her.

Now, I look back, and I think to myself… if I really knew how to love her, I would’ve let her release her feelings, then taken her home, and called her the next day. But, my pride as a man, her fallacies as a person, and whatever else that was involved just was too much to overcome for the both of us to create something special.

Recently, I met a girl that I felt could be someone special in my life, but the more I got to know her the more I realized that she wasn’t for me… at least at this moment in time. I feel like she has a hard time really expressing herself, and I feel like she was hiding things from me. And, I just can’t be with someone who’s too shy, has issues communicating their feelings, or who’s not able to open up their heart to me.

I feel like she had a spirit of fear when it came to being transparent, or opening up her heart to men, in general. Maybe it’s because she has been hurt before and never really has gotten over it, I don’t know. I think that a lot of people have a fear of opening up their heart to someone, for fear that they will get hurt… but it takes courage to love someone enough to trust them with your heart. Just like a person who has the courage to  jump out of a plane, trusting that their parachute will open.

It takes two courageous people to create a love that’s special… that’s beautiful… that will last.