Is Falling In Love Making Me Soft?

First of all, at the start of this year, I wrote an article about relationships and why you don’t need one. And shortly after that, roughly four months, I got into one unexpectedly and I’m in whole ass love out here in these streets. Do I look like Booboo the fool? The answer is yes.

I fell into something that I advocated against for so long. I didn’t think this relationship would go anywhere. And here we are five months later, making it one day at a time through his deployment. Oh yeah, did I mention he deployed shortly after we connected? It’s a cold world.

Something that I noticed in myself is that I am so much more…emotional. I have never been this soft in my life. I’ve cried more in the past few months than I have my entire four years of undergrad and maybe even high school. Like what is wrong with me? Is this normal? Why are my eyes constantly leaking? Can I chill?

I feel like I’m going soft. I was never this way. I’ve always been a stone-cold bitch. A “G” if you will. I didn’t let anyone in, didn’t let my walls down, didn’t give anyone the time of day, I didn’t even let the possibility of a relationship enter my mind. And now, I want to talk to him all the time, I want to see him, I want to be in his face, hear about his day, listen to him talk about things that I know literally nothing about. I get sad when I think of things not working between us. I get sad when I feel aggravated with him. I get sad when we have the very minor disagreements that we do.

What is going on here? It’s not just that, I’m so much more emotional in general. Do relationships bring this kind of emotional trauma into your life? No wonder I avoided them for so long.

So many times I’ve let the thought cross my mind to just break it off because we’re both at a point in our lives where we’re facing so much uncertainty. He didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just afraid. It’s scary. Probably one of the scarier things I’ve dealt with. It’s terrifying enough to open up and make the conscious decision to trust someone. I thought, “If I end this now, I could save myself a lot of potential pain in the future”. Add that to my list of irrational thoughts I have throughout the day. Thankfully, I’ve never acted on this thought. I had a friend talk me into coming to my senses and put my worries to rest.

He acknowledged that I was scared of being hurt, but running away from it wasn’t the answer. Running to it head-on was. I had never had someone treat me so well. Spoil me. Give me every ounce of their attention whenever they could. And I wanted to give that up because I was scared it wouldn’t work? What if it did? What if this boy was going to be the reason for so much happiness in my life that I would never experience because I was afraid?

See that’s the thing about relationships. They require a lot of work, whether it be communication or giving more than your partner on some days or just making the time for one another. It’s easy to accept drinks in the club from men and never speak to them again. It’s easy to act cool on Tinder for strangers. Making the choice to work on a relationship with someone is hard work. It requires you to be vulnerable. It requires you to be soft. Apparently that’s okay. This is news to me, though.

I guess that’s what happens when you genuinely care about something, you worry and fret over things that may never come close to happening. But we can’t let those worries cloud our judgments, we can’t shut ourselves off from the rest of humanity in hopes that no one will ever hurt us. Someone will hurt us, but they may also give you some of the best moments that life has to offer. So maybe being soft isn’t so bad.

-Kaitlan Darby

Kaitlan Darby is a recent graduate of UL Lafayette. She has a B.A. in Mass Communication with a concentration in Public Relations and a minor in promotional management. She is a publicist, writer, and aspiring actress. She is the founder of Black Mamba Creative, which is her own creative arts/services outlet.

Instagram: @blackmambacreative

LinkedIn: Kaitlan Darby

Website: kaitlandarby.wixsite.com/portfolio

Photo by Prince Akachi.