3 Harsh Truths about Love You Need to Know in Your 20’s

This post is about 3 harsh truths about love you need to know in your 20’s. I’m 23 years old right now, and I’ve finally figured out some things about love that I want to share. The most important advice I would give you would be to figure yourself out. Understand if there is a disconnect between what you want and what love really is.

Here are my 3 harsh truths about love you need to know in your 20’s.

You’re probably not looking for love

A lot of people, women in general, are not looking for love, especially when they think they are. We all have different definitions for the word “love”.

I’ve always been chasing love. That rosey feeling where your better half makes you feel butterflies every single day, and makes you feel amazing? The one where they always make your day and send you cute text messages when you least expect it?

That isn’t love, at least not the way I’ve come to understand. Trust me, I would know. I thought I was chasing love all these years, but I wasn’t. Not really. What I was really after was acceptance and validation. What I really wanted was for someone to remove all my insecurities for me. I wanted to not be insecure.

What love really means

One of the things that I want the most from a relationship (something I thought was love but now I know better) was to get these great exclamations of how amazing I was. I thought if a person said super cheesy and romantic things to me, it meant they loved me so much.

I always craved, and requested that from significant others. Here’s the deal: No one wants to be writing soliloquies and poems about you every single day. Love is just an emotion. It doesn’t account for the actions that you expect others to do for you. When someone says they love you, they did not say they wanted to care for you or to give you attention seven times a day.

You can’t feel love until you believe you are worthy

Allow me to reiterate what I said above: I wanted my partner to be able to validate me over and over again. I wanted to feel secure as a person. I wanted them to tell me every single day about how much they loved me or how amazing and awesome I am. I wanted them to tell me that they wanted to give me the whole world.

This is how I felt a lot of the time. But you know the crazy part about all this? I never truly believed any of it. So, I was chasing lies this whole time.

I did not believe I was worthy of any of the things I was asking to be said about me. That I was beautiful? No I actually didn’t think that. That I was kind and loving and perfect? Nope. I didn’t even think I was worthy of love, let alone the whole world being given to me.

I had been chasing LIES and this empty feeling for so long. I never believed any of these affirmations I got from others. I always thought I was imperfect, full of flaws and that I was a bad, bad, person who did not deserve anything, and was not worthy of the good things in life.

That’s where I got it all wrong. If you can’t believe that you are good enough, how do you expect others to think of you as good enough? It’s not fair to anyone to expect them to convince you of something that you don’t even believe of yourself.

You want people to think you are cool and amazing, but you never think of yourself that way. You don’t believe it.

I wanted those empty lies that I didn’t even believe. I was chasing the wrong thing. Now that I know that, I’ve realized that I can give myself those same lies that I crave from others. Better yet, I can get myself to believe they are true.

I realized that I wanted this thing from other people that only I could give myself.

I truly, badly needed this deep, intimate and divine connection with myself. I needed to heal the cracks through which this love that was reserved for me was flowing out through to others who did not deserve it. This love, this personal and self love, is reserved only for yourself.

I’m not particularly sure the word for this is love. Love is a powerful word. The more I meditate on it, I realize that love is just an umbrella term for things we don’t understand. Love means self respect. It means putting your needs before others. It means having boundaries and protecting yourself. It means self preservation. It means being good enough and believing that.

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