“Someday someone won’t be afraid of how much you love. They won’t stay on the shore; they’ll meet you in the depths.” ~ Unknown

Life teaches us lessons about who we are and what type of love we need to satisfy our own individual yearnings.

We meander through heartbreak, misery and ecstasy until we have finally absorbed everything we don’t want so that we might be able to identify exactly what it is that we do want.

Yet, knowing what we want and believing we are worthy of receiving it are two different ideas.

We can say we want someone to understand all the darkest corners of our soul, but when someone comes along who actually does, it may trigger us to retreat.

If someone comes along who can spark our greatest desires and passions, enticing us to spread our wings even further, it’s sometimes tempting to just fly away altogether.

Without realizing it, we may be most scared of getting exactly what we want.

When we have chaos in our love lives, we don’t step up to the plate as our highest selves. So when we’re suddenly faced with getting what we want and need, we can feel triggered to run—because can we actually handle getting what we want?

It’s easy to say that we want to be loved for who we are, but to actually feel that type of love can be overwhelming. If we aren’t ready to rise to the challenge of knowing we are worthy of receiving it, we will continue to find ourselves in relationships where our needs just aren’t being met.

To love is a gamble, yet only when the stakes are the highest will the rewards also be the sweetest.

The truth is that the only person who is standing in the way of getting the type of romantic love that we want is ourselves. It’s difficult to continue to make the choice to be vulnerable, to put it all out there despite how many times it’s been given back to us by those not worthy of our love—those who have simply marked “Return to Sender” upon our tender hearts.

In order to get the love that we want, we first have to believe that we are worthy of it.

We have to believe that we deserve to be loved unconditionally for our entire flawed self, that we are worthy of receiving goodness and passion—and not only that we deserve it, but that it’s possible as well.

It’s easy to go through life a skeptic, thinking that what we want doesn’t really exist, because if it doesn’t then we won’t ever be challenged to go through whatever it takes to get it.

We simply let ourselves off the hook and instead accept a life of complaining about everything that is wrong with the love that we have accepted.

We accept what we don’t want out of fear of having what it is that we do, because deep down we don’t think we are worthy of being loved in all the ways that our souls crave to be.

It’s a journey toward receiving the love that we want, and it isn’t always easy.

In order to actually be in a place to get what we want, we first have to love ourselves in the way that we want another to. We have to accept all of our delicate intricacies and intoxicating contradictions.

We do this by separating how we want to be loved from how we have been told we should be loved.

We each do this love thing differently. Some of us love white dresses and pretty little picket fences that bring security, while others crave freedom and the adventure that comes from loving independently of society’s standards.

Some crave sparkly diamonds, and others crave skin that glows iridescent in the moonlight.

But until we can determine what love is for each us, and how monogamy, polyamory or even living situations play into our overall ideals of love, we will continue to accept what it is we believe we deserve instead of inviting what it is that we really want into our lives.

We have to tell ourselves that we are worthy of love, that there isn’t anything about us that is unlovable—not to the right person.

Not all of us are on the same journey, so what we want and accept will be different. To some, the point of love is marriage, yet for others it’s much more than just a piece of paper.

The trick is for each of us to own our truth about what love is for us—whatever that may mean.

It’s letting ourselves love in precisely the unique way that we were born to, and making the choice to let into our lives and hearts what it is that we need from another.

We have to not let the fear of getting what we want overshadow the joys we can find there, because while not everything lasts forever, once in a while something does.

Because all it takes is one person to love you like you’ve wanted all along to make you realize that getting what you want is possible, but only once you can believe that you’re worthy of it.

“The only thing we ever really want is to be loved by someone, with the same ferocity in which we love.” ~ J Iron Word

Author: Kate Rose

Image: you me/Flickr

Editor: Nicole Cameron