I Don't Need You, I Prefer You
I don’t need you, I prefer you. I know, it’s hard and it’s necessary to leave many things behind to speak these words. Among other things, it is necessary to abandon cowardice and fill ourselves with courage, bravery, and patience. Lots and lots of patience.
Patience to explain that just by preferring you, I can come to love you and value you infinitely more than if I need you, because that means that I don’t need compliments to cover up my faults or my defects. Nobody in life is responsible for completing what is missing on me.
“They made us believe that ‘real love’ only happens once, more likely before your 30s. They never told us that love is not something that you can put in motion, that doesn’t have a schedule.
They made us believe that each one of us is the half of an orange and that life only makes sense when you find that other half. They did not tell us that we were born as a whole and that no one in our lives deserves to carry on his back such responsibility of completing what is missing on us.
They made us believe in a formula ‘two in one’: two people sharing the same line of thinking, same ideas, and that it is what works. It’s never been told that it has another name: invalidation. Only two individuals with their own personality is how you can have a healthy relationship.
It has been made to believe that marriage is an obliged institution and that fantasies out of hour should be repressed.
They made us believe that the thin and beautiful are the ones who are more loved. They made us believe that there’s one formula to be happy, the same one to everybody, and the ones that escape from that are condemned to be delinquents.
We have never been told that those formulas go wrong, they get people frustrated, they are alienating, and that we can try other alternatives.
Oh! Also they did not tell us that no one will tell those things to us. Each and every one of us will have to learn by ourselves. And when we get to the point that you are in love with yourself first, that’s when you can fall in love with somebody.
We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight.”
With this, I mean that the only person that we need in order to live is ourselves. And I, making full use of my right to emotional liberty, choose you to be at my side that we may enjoy one another.
I have decided to stop enslaving myself and being attached to my emotional past. I will not allow others to define who I am. I am going to look for a way to express my entire being and to explore the depths of my ocean. Then I can be myself.
I am committing myself to never giving pleasure to others without first giving pleasure to myself. I am not going to let myself go along with the crowd or be carried away by the current. Starting now, I am free of the strangling effect of my thoughts and I will work so that my decisions make me feel good about my life.
Getting rid of the band-aids and bandages that cover my wounds will help me create a deep and authentic connection with you, because if you don’t love freely, it is preferable not to love at all, as emotional dependency destroys.
I don’t know if I will love you all my life, nor do I know if I will always do it with the same force, but what I do know is that right now, I prefer you over all other people. You are not in my mind every second of the day, but you are always with me.
I choose love and I will keep being my own master. Because the strongest feeling of love that exists is the love of oneself. Because, as Perls said:
“I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine.
I am I… a complete being, though I have my faults. You are you… a complete being, though you have your faults.
If we find and accept one another, if we are able to stop questioning our differences and celebrate our mysteries together, we can walk one with the other, be mutual, respectful, sacred, and loving company on our path.
You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.
I lack love for myself when, in any attempt to please you, I betray myself. I lack love for you when I try to make you be the way I want you instead of accepting you the way you really are.
You are you. And I am I.”
Main image courtesy of natalia_maroz