falling in love in a coffee shop

Queue im still here if you still want me by Montell Fish

*cover photo - poem by Yung Pueblo*

Thank you for reading therapy made me worse. Nothing warms my heart more than sharing my work with all of you. If you connect with anything I write, please tell others about our little corner of the internet.

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I have been reallly struggling with what falling in love is supposed to feel like.

Is it the can't help but smile every time I look at you? Right now that’s what I keep going back to. How our first date literally felt like fireworks, were somehow defying every law of physics, imploding inside me and outside of me. The week before our first date I had written paragraphs upon paragraphs about how I was bored to tears of first dates and wanted the three month into a relationship phase - comfortable with a slight bit of glitter mixed in.

Is it the friendship that grows and grows until one day you look at each other and realize this is it? Months after our first date, I became convinced that’s who I was actually supposed to love… the friendship turned love turned marriage and babies in a carriage I didn’t see coming. Then I finally understood the trope of not dating your best friend. And I learned that wasn’t my love either.

Recently…and I mean over the past few years…falling in love feels like asking permission. Am I allowed to love this person or should I wait for you? All I want in the entire world. With every heart beat, I think just say it. Instead I push and push in the opposite direction. Never forcing you to answer or myself to ask. Never allowing myself to accept a love outside of the one I’ve pictured with you…every version of you that’s existed.

The most common, beyond repetitive phrase I’ve been hearing in my life is “are you sure you’re not only dating men who are emotionally unavailable?” It’s like okay ummm who made everyone in my life a therapist? Who taught you the phrase “emotionally unavailable”? Why is the truth so brutally apparently honest to every person in my life except for me?

I’ve felt the fireworks. I want the fireworks. It wasn’t until tonight that I realized, it’s when I see fireworks taking off from the guy sitting across from me, that every gate locks and keys are melted down. Am I emotionally unavailable?

*that’s so raven gif* (I have tried so hard to input a That’s So Raven gif and it would not happen. So close your eyes, picture Raven doing her vision thing and you’ve got the gist)

I text my friend after my date and quite simply, “cute. fun. but not X”. That should be the good thing! That. should. be. the. good. thing.

Remember all those instatherapists that would yell at us that we shouldn’t have to fight for love? That matriarchs before us weren’t heroes (well yes they were) but also damn victims.

Instead I’m over here like…he was so much fun and amazing and clearly has goals in life and was clear in his intentions and respectful of boundaries but you know, I see things moving quickly and falling in love and ending in happiness and I can never let that happen I’m not ready to let that happen. I should continue to live in limbo with man after man that has little to no desire to give themselves a promising future, much less include me in those plans.

Eons ago, I went on a date with a married man (I SWEAR he said they had an arrangement...do not fucking cancel me). A thought that came to mind but I conveniently never explored was “I think this may be the perfect relationship for me. All the attention, care, and time (bruh was painting a pretty picture) without any of the commitment.” At the time, I was looking for a committed relationship. Tell me how those two things align? Oh yeah…emotionally unavailable = me.

For the first time, in I truly cannot tell you how many years, I looked up one of the first love poems I can remember being meaningful, powerful, beautiful, and weeping of love - A working list of things I will never tell you. by Jon Sands. Sadly I’m unsure if it hits 30 year old me with the same emphasis as 18 year old me. There are still parts that reverberate within me though. I had always seen myself as Jon…how painful to sneak into a quiet apartment to sleep on your side of the bed. But now? I feel like I’m the pink pony. After all these years though, isn’t the last line the question I’m not asking? Will you stay? But as Jon so eloquently puts it, “if you had asked me to stay, I would not have said no but it would never mean yes”. Have I really spent the past decade+ looking for dead pink pony love?

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Tomorrow, I will be publishing my first paid subscribers only post. I feel like a big meanie to exclude any of you (which I don’t have to if you pay). But the paid subscriber entries are the deepest, rawest, purest parts of my heart. It feels necessary to put up a boundary (remember I’m emotionally unavailable). I hope those that take the step to pay, will protect and honor my heart even I don’t always do the same. If you are already a subscriber (paid or not) as of 11/26, there is a special email coming your way.

Regardless if you choose to become a paid subscriber or not, thank you for supporting me. This love is unimaginable. I’ve been writing and reflecting and attempting to see a pattern in my dating history for an hour after getting home from a date at 2am. All so I can bare my heart to you (even if I can’t yet bare it to the men that want to love me). A very not hidden in a hyperlink shoutout to Week to Week by Ollie - “Pursuing adventure got lows but also incredible heights / It must be the meaning it’s why keep doing these 2am nights”. As much as I want the answer to the million questions I ask myself each week, I *know* I will look back on this time of my life as the time I found my voice (my words) again. Thanks Universe and at the expense of continuing an already too long ramble, I never in my life knew this song was part love song.

xx Christina Nicole