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My therapist says, show people who you really are, and you get the absolute thrill of knowing they love you for you.
The one that believes someone could love her without one day resenting her, without seeing her laundry list of needs and hurdles as burdens but rather as beautiful parts of what make her her. Because I know that having arthritis, being autistic, does not make me less whole or human. It doesn’t make me wrong or broken. It makes some things in my life more challenging in ways, yes, and maybe I don’t represent the “norm,” but I can be someone who surmounts obstacles without it meaning there’s something fundamentally lacking in my makeup.
I told myself I simply wouldn’t love or be loved that way, not anymore. Because each time I let someone in and they show me I’m not worth the work, it’s become more painful, more difficult to bounce back.
I have to remind myself that her doubt and distrust aren’t about me. They’re about her past and how it hurt her. For someone whose thinking is as analytical and pattern oriented as Frankie’s, the past is the best predictor of the future.
“I understood becoming a couple to mean that, among other things, when either of us was hurting, we were no longer alone in that. So, I have a relationship to your pain. It’s not mine, and I don’t get to tell you what to do with it, but I get to choose to love you through it. And if and when you need care and comfort—which, like it or not, the past forty-eight hours, you did—I get to be the person who gives it to you. That’s basically the point of a relationship. Isn’t it?”
“Relationships aren’t perfect, Frankie. They’re living, breathing things. They have growing pains. They have highs and lows. They take trust and forgiveness. They don’t require perfection or flawlessness. They just require two people who want to love each other and keep learning the best way to do that.”
If you believe you’re lovable, you have to believe there’s someone out there up for loving you.
But not everyone has to love us, just the people who matter. That’s what I told you, but you showed me: be yourself, and let those who are lucky enough to love you, love you for who you are.”
Neither of us is perfect. We’re weird and odd and we carry our fair share of fears and worries and hang-ups. But we love each other. We see each other. We work hard to make each other feel understood and safe and adored.
