I think love is easily the largest unsolved problem in my life. It looms over me every day like an unfulfilled promise. Some promises you forget, but this one comes back to haunt me, time and time again.

I don't want to be melodramatic, which I likely already am, but it's that time of night again.

There is a deficit of love in my life, of love received, but probably of love given too. It started when I was a kid, when the household I was born into was unceremoniously cut in half. I don't think having divorced parents makes me special - I know it doesn't, and some friends (now former friends) used to remind me of that a lot - but it almost certainly shaped me into the person I am today, in ways immeasurable.

For one, the absence of a parent left my love lopsided. It is hard to be loved by a Skype call, a face on a screen, or a person that you see only every other school holiday. It is yet worse still to not understand why that person cannot love you, and to mold your heart around their presence, just for it to be left empty. For those school holidays, I got one to two weeks of happiness, balanced out by the inevitable stabbing pain of absence. I can imagine that year after year of that takes a toll on you, years of confusion, sadness, and angst, until eventually the wound calluses over, and only the most violent of emotions can unearth it.

I say imagine because it was years ago now, the memory of hugging my father goodbye at the airport now faint and worn at the edges. But if I feel for them now, the old calluses reveal themselves.

The half that stayed with me was in many ways the opposite. Whilst my father was kindly absent, my mother was angrily present. Her psyche pervaded every room of the house, an unstoppable force that threatened to bowl over anything in its path. I don't want to adjudicate my mother's parenting, as I know for a fact that she tried her best. My every material need and desire was provided for, my education, my extracurriculars, my indulgences. But there are things that material possessions cannot substitute. She was harsh, commanding, but not fair, not in the slightest. She shaped me with sheer will, a machine with a cast iron mold that I fought and squirmed to resist, but could not. I took the victories that I could - the three hours between my return home from school and her return home from work - but they were small victories. The sound of the elevator doors to our floor opening was the signal to retreat, and the key in the door marked the final echoing shot across no man's land.

In this environment, I starved for love. I didn't know what acceptance could feel like, and so I didn't even yearn for it. The answers I needed were to questions I didn't know to ask. And so it continued, until boarding school.

Boarding school was where I met Her, The Ex. Without invoking too much of her, I can say that being with her gave me the first taste of what I thought love was meant to be. To be honest, I don't know how to talk about it. I know, factually, all the things that happened. I know that she told me she loved me, and 6 months later, told me she just thought that's what I wanted to hear. I know that she pulled away from me, so far back that I almost lost sight of her. I also know that I held on to her like I was hanging miles above the ground, until my knuckles turned white. I know now that it didn't work.

It turned out that way because that's who we were. Neither of us knew what love was, but we both knew what it was meant to be, and so we forced ourselves to fit into the shapes we had created in our minds. In the end, the closer we became, the more we forced ourselves, the more we dug into each other, like two hedgehogs trying to get warm. Eventually, she withdrew out of my reach, and I gave up grasping at nothing.

If I can vaguely feel the calluses from my childhood, then the scars from my relationship stick out sorely on my bare skin, rippling with dissatisfaction. What hurts the most is not the words that were said, or the memories, or the 'what if's. Rather, it was that I had the taste of it, of love, of acceptance, of true understanding, of a rose without the thorns, but no sooner had I tasted it than it was snatched away from me. I used this *extremely* melodramatic metaphor before with a friend:

"It's like I was sitting in a room with the lights off for 18 years, and I'd gotten used to sitting in the dark. Then someone came and flipped the lights on for just a minute, and now it's all I can think about." cue tiny violin

I think it's wrong to have the mindset of 'a relationship would fix me'. Dependency is definitely unsustainable. But I also don't know where else this love could come from. While I do not doubt that my friends love me, I don't think that this level of need could be filled by platonic relationships, or at least, I haven't experienced it yet. Of course, there is the idea of 'self-love', and whilst I'm fairly self-sufficient, I don't think I have, or practice, or engage in self-love enough, whatever that looks like. And I don't think self-love alone can completely stymie the need for external love. Which leaves me with a dilemma - I think, in all honesty, a relationship *would* fix me (to some degree), but also that shouldn't be the case, and if you approach relationships with that mindset, you should not be in a relationship at all. Maybe it's possible that a relationship would fix me, but I don't seek relationships with the goal to be fixed, which would require suppressing the involuntary yearning to fulfil my most fundamental need. 🀧