Loving You Was Easy, But Unloving You Might Kill Me

It might just be the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

By Unwritten — Last updated on Apr 07, 2023

Photo: martin-dm / Getty Images via Canva

By Kait MacKinnon

The hardest part was not saying “goodbye.”

The hardest part is learning how to start unloving you after saying goodbye. It’s learning how to live my life without you in it.

Having this love for you keeps you present, so I need to learn how to unlove you.

When I first told you I loved you, it was the first time I had professed that to anyone. We were sitting in traffic, arguing playfully about something minuscule and unimportant.

And I just kind of blurted it out. “I love you.”

Love. I love you. I said it. I love you! I felt it surging through my body.

And then I heard you say it back. I think I really breathed for the first time in my life. I almost cried.

You see, the truth is that I had loved you for a long time before that. I held it in for so long, keeping it only for myself until one day, I just... couldn’t do it anymore.

And that was the day, that was the moment.

I needed to tell someone. And that someone was you. It felt so easy to love you. You were so easy to love, thanks to the way you’d smirk at me when you were thinking of something funny. Or the way you’d mumble a low “mmhmm” when I’d look at you for too long.

It was effortless to fall for you.

I was in love with the way your hair stood up in every direction when you were frustrated or when you were fresh off of your motorbike. I was in love with the way my favorite pair of your jeans hugged your body so perfectly that it seemed as if they were made for you.

I loved the stories, the made-up songs, the funny jokes. I loved every part of it and you — even the parts I shouldn’t have loved.

You were you, and I was me. We belonged together and I’d never been happier. I could’ve spent all day and night with you. I was never exhausted by your company. You were it for me. As far as I was concerned, no other man in the world existed.

I hated myself for waiting so long to let you into this part of my life, a part I never wanted to see you without. Until one day, when you weren’t there anymore. Everything I knew ended.

The worst part is that I still love you. And I don’t know how to stop loving you.

How do I unlove you? Why is unloving you the hardest thing I’ll ever learn to do? How could loving you be the easiest thing in the world while unloving you can be so hard? How do I wake up in the morning and lay down at night knowing that I shouldn’t be loving you?

And that you’re not going to text me, that you’re not going to make me pasta, since it’s the only thing you know how to make well, that you’re not a part of my life, and that when I see you, it’s as an acquaintance and not as we should be.