The L Word...

Nope, not Love. Long term relationships. This is not going to be easy to write about. But given the topic of this blog, I’d be a fraud if I didn’t write it. Deep breaths. At thirty years old, you’d expect that I would have engaged in at least one, maybe two or three long term relationships by now, yes? Well what if I told you that I haven’t? That with the exception of the odd short lived fling, I have never been in a relationship? No, I am not making it up. Most people look at me like I have three heads if I admit it out loud. I struggle with it all the time.

The thing about relationship experience is that as you get more of it, the less frightening it becomes to be intimate and completely vulnerable. And the longer time goes by without experiencing that kind of intimacy, the more terrifying it becomes. Sometimes I think I have no idea how to be in a relationship, and it might be easier to just to welcome spinsterhood with open arms and tell people I’ve missed the boat and it’s too late. If I make fun of myself, try to avoid thinking about it, and run a mile when the opportunity for intimacy comes up, things are whole lot easier, right? Wrong.

Other people may be able to do that. I am sure many probably do. Perhaps for them it is better to have cushioned their pride than to risk being hurt. Sometimes it is easy to see that as logical. But the truth is, however heightened my terror is of being laughed at by a man for my lack of experience, it is not as painful as the idea of always being alone. Of never loving a man with every ounce of my being.

Amazingly I have two good friends the same age who have never had long term relationships either. One, who I am closer to, feels the same way I do and finds it just as difficult to talk about. The other falls into the latter category of accepting impending spinsterhood. I believe there are probably a lot of women out there like us who don’t like to admit it. Who maybe despite relationships with others, still have a love-hate relationship with themselves and are a little bit frightened of intimacy and vulnerability. Those are the people I hope to reach by writing this blog.

I don’t want to be trapped forever by my own fear of myself. I hope this blog will be in some way therapeutic and help me find that belief in myself. The belief that I deserve to be loved, and that I deserve to be happy, no matter what my experiences are. This is a belief that I have to work hard to foster and nurture inside me. It always has been. I can remember reading a self help book about attracting love into your life. Like many of those kinds of books, it asked the reader to visualise the love and happiness in they wished they had. It almost chokes me up to admit it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t visualise myself happy and in love because my head was so full of self loathing that all I could think of was ‘who in their right mind would love me?’. I knew at that moment that there was my biggest hurdle. I didn’t even love myself, so how could I possibly attract the person who would love me wholly for everything that I am?

I’m not in that place now. Although some days I sit perched on the edge. I want that edge to be as far away from me as possible. I deserve to be loved and happy and cherished. I deserve to be someone’s princess. I will be. I believe that.