Love Should Make You Feel Like You're Enough, Not Like A Victim
No one should ever feel like they are too much or too little of anything when they are in love.
getty By Nneka M. Okona
Star-crossed lovers we were. Or so I thought.
Now I’m only faced with a barrage of endless questions, wondering if what we shared, what I thought we shared on and off for the past nine years, was a facade — an idealized figment of my imagination.
He was my Mr. Big — a fleeting love, a love I couldn’t encapsulate as hard as I tried. A love which, the closer I felt myself inching towards completion and falling into him, the further he danced away from me. A love that was never quite within reach.
And... he’s engaged. He is engaged to another woman now. And I'm finding myself struggling to learn how to get over a breakup as heartbreaking as this one.
I found out recently through a scan of his Facebook profile, which is something I do periodically, especially during one of those phases when we are “off” and not speaking. We’ve been “off” for months now and it seems as though “off” is where we shall forever remain.
I’ll admit — the last time I spoke to him I was nasty and petty. I texted him a flurry of messages congratulating him on the new relationship he was in, the only relationship in years he’d deemed worthy enough of making public on Facebook by changing his relationship status.
She must be something special, I thought to myself. The last time he’d changed his relationship was months after we’d first met.
I was 20 back then. I was newly in love for the first time. I’d had sex for the first time at that point... with him.
He convinced me their relationship (a woman he later had a child with) was not real. He told me it was an April Fool’s joke gone awry with too many inconsequential details that didn’t add up.
I was at a party with friends that night when he called me. I remember it vividly. He pleaded and begged for me to not walk away like I felt I should.
I think back to that moment often. What if I had just walked away? Would my heart and mind and spirit be as tinged, as scarred with memories of him, of us, like I hold now?
He robbed me. I feel like a victim to love, like I’ve been shanked by a thief in the night. He took my hope from me. He stole it forcefully with no warning.
He is engaged now, which means my naive hope of one day reuniting with him, of things magically working out and our twirling and merging our lives together, has to die. A slow, crushing death.
This is the end of an era. I am devastated thinking what could have been or what was never meant to be. I have to let go.
My rose-colored glasses have to be thrown to wayside now along with embracing acceptance. I can own that I loved him in a way I have never quite loved anyone else yet, and also own that he did not make me feel free.
Loving him was like being chained to a small existence and shrinking myself to make him feel comfortable. I was too much for him in many ways — too sensitive, too emotional, too forthcoming, too intellectual, too analytical, too ambitious, too much of myself. And really, isn’t love supposed to make us feel like we are enough as is?
My gargantuan heart has taken many beatings. It has subsisted through warring and remained into tact despite bruising, punching, stabbing and wounding.
And this heart of mine won’t stop hoping, reaching, waiting for a freeing love, a nurturing love. A love which gives me the space to blossom closer to who I am and a resting space to abide from an outside world riddled with pain, heartache and horror. A safe space. A love that is a safe space within it all.
Nneka M. Okona is a travel writer from Atlanta with a wanderlusting spirit set ablaze during her time living in Madrid. She can’t travel without a silk eye mask, noise canceling head phones or her portable yoga mat.