Love

For the last several weeks I've been thinking a lot about love. Ha and you may be thinking, when is she ever not thinking about love? And that's valid ;) but I've learned so much about it lately. More than I usually do in this short of time. I've learned so much about vulnerability and the power in that. I was really really open with Nate. And it left me super vulnerable. And the last several weeks I've regretted that hard core. It makes me feel unsafe and still really vulnerable around him. And I don't feel like he understands what it means to me or what sharing those things with him meant. But today I learned something new. Perhaps it was too much, but being that vulnerable has facilitated more change in me than I thought was possible from such a short relationship. It's been painful and hard but it's allowed me to be open and honest with myself because I was so open with him. And because it left me feeling so vulnerable, wanting validation or assurance about what he thinks, and open to being hurt (and I got hurt), it's forced me to search elsewhere for that validation. And it has made me reflect upon where I get my confidence. It's made me think about who I am and who I want to be and if I like those things. It's made me seek inprovement. And I've progressed a lot faster than I otherwise would have on my journey to being confident in God and being confident in myself. And I've realized that that is what vulnerability does. It opens the pathway of progression. And if I can be okay with how vulnerable i still feel around him, being vulnerable with the next person will be easier. Because my confidence in myself will no longer be placed in how they respond to that openness or what they think of me because of it. Rather I will have confidence in Heavenly Father and myself. And then I can be vulnerable to other people because my base is solid.

Tonight Allegra and I also talked a lot about what it means to love. We talked about relationships. Particularly the speed of relationships, physical relationships, and the types of people we want to date. Something that I've decided I really want is to just get to know someone for a while before I feel like they are "pursuing" me. I want to let our relationship develop really naturally. I want to be okay with not progressing a physical relationship for a long time. And I want a physical relationship to develop out of a desire to show someone you care about them, not out of a desire to meet a need or passion you feel. And I think that will help it be slow. Because of someone really wants to use physical touch to simply express how they feel about me then they'll be okay with just holding my hand. Or giving me a hug. Or putting their arm around me. Rather than feel the need to progress so quickly on to kissing.

Anyways, those are my thoughts. There are a bunch more. About how I view dating and marriage and thinking about the future. And it makes those types of relationships seem very distant. And I think im okay with that. Right now I'm just okay with working on myself and learning better what it means to love the people around me. And as I do that I will be that much more prepared when that day finally does come that I can take that step.

Okedoke. Goodnight!

LOVE

Tonight I watched Divergent.

I wasn't planning on it. I got home from work and my roommates were at a neighboring apartment and so I went to join them. And they were watching it. So I just stayed.

I was so grossed out by all the violence. Killing, especially when done via knife or gun, is really hard for me to handle in movies. It makes me feel really deeply and it almost makes me get more sensitive. I'm not sure I quite understand it. It makes me not know what to do.

In the movie there is a love story. Between the two Divergents. And it's cute and perfect and wonderful. But after the movie I had all this bitterness towards all boys. I realized it as I was talking to Allegra. And as we talked about it I realized, and she taught me, a lot of things. I used to love love stories like that. I would get all giddy over them and day dream about them. But now I get frustrated and have all these angry feelings about them. And I think tonight I may have understood why.

I learned a few years ago that romance and relationships and love were not what I thought they were. I learned that intellectually first, and then I felt it. But I only felt what it was not. I felt like the thing I had dreamed about and wished and hoped for didn't actually exist. It wasn't real. It was something made up in the movies and in the books. It didn't actually ever happen like that in real life. I understood that. I internalized it. And I tried to be okay with it.

Every once in a while i felt like I got a glimpse of what true love actually is. What it is in reality. And in those brief moments it made me happy. Not like the happy, giddy, dreamy feeling I got after watching Mr. Knightly and Emma, not the hope for something fake. Rather it was a deep happiness. And I got a glimpse of what that deep happiness would look like when I found that real love.

On my mission I learned a lot about love. I learned what it meant to love a companion even when sometimes you were so frustrated with her you could hardly be civil. That was when real love came in to play. When you kept loving them and put their needs ahead of your own.

But coming home I think I fell back into this jaded perspective of love. Things just didn't work out the way I wanted and I've been starting to let myself believe that it would just never feel the way I wanted it to. I want to stop that. Because I know it's not true. Allegra said something that made me really think. She said, "I think romantic love is very very close to love you feel for a friend."

I actually don't know how I feel about this right now. So i'm going to stop writing it. But those are my thoughts thus far.