Guest Bloggers Takeover // Room For Doubt

I don’t often admit this on blogging spaces, but I can become quite frustrated with the state of my romantic affairs. I’ve always felt like I am built to be in a relationship. I love being in love, I love being with love. It just makes sense in my mind, that I would have found the person that I am destined to be with for the rest of my life by now. Right? I’m currently with someone and he is everything that I am not, hence my attraction towards him. He is outgoing, social, confident, self-assured, loves himself unconditionally, the life of the party. He is able to separate emotion from a situation and solve it logically. He is musically inclined. When I look at those things about him, I wish I was more. I think in that sense, we help provide one another support in the areas of our personality that are lacking. I see the logic of it. I do.

But my emotions cloud my judgement sometimes because I feel like this person, who does not wear his heart on his sleeve as readily as I do, will never truly understand me for that very reason. The passion and the romantic “just because” gestures won’t happen because that’s not him. I had expectations of a relationship, this was the reality of mine. I accept him for who he is, that’s where the love comes in. But with it comes uncertainty because I know and have acknowledged how different he and I can be. The sun and the moon. There’s a poetry to our love that is undeniable. I just worry that it isn’t sustainable.

Over the past several months he and I have been dating, I’ve had so much bitterness and resentment crawl into the cracks of the foundation we worked to build, leaving me insecure and feeling as though our higher ground was somehow weak and capable of being infiltrated. The vision for potential becomes skewed and blurred because of what I’ve been through. I get told by him so often, “I’m not those other niggas.” But I’ve heard words before. And although I hold them dearly, words sometimes don’t mean shit. It’s all in the action of the thing. The actions are all there. But it’s difficult to build with someone when you’re constantly afraid they’ll leave. I often fear that he’ll wake up one morning and not be as tantalized by our differences, that maybe he’ll meet someone who is more like him: someone less introverted, someone less victimizing, someone who doesn’t need to constantly be reminded that they are wanted and that they are loved, someone who is less work. I fear this because I wake up some days feeling this way, especially within the wake of one of our arguments.

I wonder if he’ll realize like all the men before him that I am “too much”. That’s what shitty relationships do to you. They wound you and just as those scars are beginning to heal, something happens that reignites the memory of what once was, and you punish your current partner for the people of your past who couldn’t love you the way you needed to be loved. It isn’t fair to him. I feel like we’ve said we are serious for a while but have only truly become serious within the past couple of months. I see him starting to take steps that I’ve voiced needing in order to feel our relationship progressing. He’s making more time for us, becoming more affectionate, meeting and building relationships with my close friends – making it apparent that he not only wants to be here, but he’s willing to fight to show me too. And actions speak louder than any words could, don’t they?

I do not where to begin when it comes to rewiring what my past has done. Is it normal to feel doubt? Is it normal to go through the ringer with someone, experience ups and downs, be able to say, “I like it here” but still have days where I wonder why I’m even here at all? Is it fair to him? Is it fair to me? Is it fair to us? One thing that’s for certain is the fact that he will always be the anchor in this relationship, the guiding light – I just hope he doesn’t get tired of being strong. The minute I think I’ve done the self-worth it takes to be in a relationship is the second I second guess every part of me I’ve worked so hard to rebuild. I wish there wasn’t any room for doubt. But the space between us sometimes makes me feel like there will always be…