I don’t understand why we feel the need to compromise ourselves for love, when the ideal love allows us to be loved as we are… or at least I thought.
Perhaps a lot of people have been doing it wrong. By it, I mean relationships built on love. I don’t for one moment, think people stay the same in a relationship. I do believe they should become better and the love you have for them should grow as they grow. The right love inspires growth.
How is it possible that people grow apart? My theory is that they don’t. I could be wrong, but I can’t think of anything that grows apart…. Not even in nature. (Then again, I’m not that smart to just know everything). However, if you’re growing, everything grows collectively. My arm didn’t grow apart from my body, it grew with my body. My thoughts are, if it grows separately (to justify growing apart), it was never together to begin with… (that’s a whole new bag of burritos under the hood).
When people say “oh we grew apart”, what that means to me is, neither of you knew who the other person was and never envisioned who the other would become. If the person you’re with after a certain amount of time, doesn’t do the things they once did before you got together, my belief is that you never knew who they truly were to begin with. Chances are they compromised who they were to have you.
For example, a woman that cooked for her man while they were dating but after being married for some time, rarely cooks at all… that’s because she was never really a cooker. She only did that because that’s what the man liked and she wanted to “bag” him. Cooking was not apart of her character. Consider a man that talks to a woman all day while he’s courting her, or takes her out on dates while they’re dating but doesn’t do any of that after they’ve said “I do”…. It’s not that they’ve gotten comfortable, it is that the person they presented in the trial stages was not who they really were. (Again, this is my theory.)
The flip side is why do we feel the need to present the “best version” of ourselves or what we feel the other person wants, knowing that’s not what they deserve? They don’t deserve a presentation. They don’t deserve what we think they want. They deserve the real us because that is the best person we’ve committed to being at that stage of our lives. They deserve the truth FROM JUMP.
The real “us” is what a person needs and as a result, sometimes the real us isn’t what the other person wants.
We owe people the chance to make that decision for themselves with all the cards on the table. We need to be okay with people not wanting us once they get to know us. At least you aren’t robbing someone of the best years of their life.
No one wants to feel like they’ve wasted their investment on someone that was never going to produce the product of relationship they were looking for.
I’m getting to the place where I’ve decided I don’t like to cook. I can cook very well, but I don’t want to so I don’t. I get no enjoyment being in the kitchen for reasons the person I’ll end up with will be privy to know. I’ve been that person that cooked and prepared some banging meals only for the boy to go be with someone else at the end of the day. So at 26, now I’m like, I might as well just be me. Someone will vibe with it, and if they don’t at least I’m not stuck in a relationship being someone I’m not. I imagine that’s exhausting.
Just be yourself… but in order to be yourself, you have to do the work to really know yourself. Know who you are and don’t compromise that relationship for the sake of a relationship with someone else. Trust me, it’s not worth it in the long run. You just end up unhappy… or settling, forcing yourself to be content.
I don’t understand why we feel the need to compromise ourselves for love, when the ideal love allows us to be loved as we are… or at least I thought.
*cues "Hello" by Erykah Badu*....