Doesn’t everyone deserve love?
To be loved? To be accepted? To be cared for?
Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched friends go through devastating breakups, and I’ve noticed a recurring sentiment that I’d like to warn you about.
I know many empathetic, big-hearted, patient people with lots of love to give. Some of them have been in relationships with terrible people. Scratch that. Let’s say they were in relationships with regular people with inner demons, deep wounds, and insufficient coping mechanisms.
Is that you? Now? A patient and caring person in a relationship with someone whose wounds make them relate to you in harmful ways?
Even when you KNOW you need to get away for your own health and/or happiness, it makes sense that kind-hearted people will ask, “Doesn’t everyone deserve to be loved?”
You see your hurting partner and your compassion leads you to keep loving them. You make space for their anger, their sadness, their attacks. You give your love, your care, your understanding, your forgiveness. Your big heart leads you to keep giving and giving and giving.
You don’t want to abandon them. What would it mean to walk away? Wouldn’t it leave the other hurting person alone? Un-understood? Unloved?
And doesn’t everyone deserve to be loved?
Yes. Sure. Absolutely. Everyone needs understanding and compassion and care.
But here’s what I wish you could hear:
It doesn’t have to be YOU.
It doesn’t have to be you.
IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE YOU.
It’s not your job. It’s not your obligation. It’s not your duty. It’s not your calling. It’s not your burden. It’s not your cage. It’s not your sentence. It’s not your responsibility. It’s not your life.
Love, understanding, compassion, and care can come from so many sources. They are sometimes hard to find and hard to access, but the world is full of recurring opportunities to learn, to grow, and to heal.
When all else fails, the universe made mamas, and therapists, and priests, and bartenders, and journals, and god, and pets. And sure, not all of these are available to everyone, and not all of them do a very good job.
But that still doesn’t make it your job to be the source of love and understanding for your partner.
It’s their job to find the best tools to help them feel love and find healing. It’s their task to keep trying to figure out what they need.
It doesn’t have to be YOU.
No matter how much they rage and demand that it has to be YOU.
No matter how much they cry and beg that it keep being YOU.
No matter how much they feel that they deserve YOU.
(Or how much you feel like you deserve them.)
No matter how much they think they have the right to keep hurting YOU.
That if it’s ever been you then it has to keep being you.
Over and over and over again.
They’re wrong.
You’re right to believe that they deserve love. We all do, and they do, too.
But you’re wrong to believe that it means you have to stay.
You don’t.
You can go.
It doesn’t have to be you.
Because you ALSO deserve love. You deserve compassion, understanding, and care. You deserve room to heal. You deserve to be let off the hook. You deserve to get away from the things that harm you.
And it’s your job to find the best tools to help YOU feel love and find healing. It’s your task to figure out what YOU need.
You deserve love, too, and it doesn’t have to be them.
