Dear Future Love, I Hope You’re Worth the Wait

A letter to the person I haven’t met, and the loneliness that comes before them.

People say destiny is romantic.

That the inexplicable force pulling two people together after years of heartbreak and endless searching is beautiful. That somewhere, written in the stars, is the person you’re destined to spend your life with.

I disagree.

The idea that fate has already decided my love story doesn’t feel romantic to me.

Do you know what I think is romantic?

The idea that one day, completely uninfluenced by destiny or some cosmic plan, a man will look at me and choose me.

Out of roughly four billion women on this planet…

He chooses me.

Now that’s romantic.

I’ve always been obsessed with love.

Not just the idea of it, but the kind of love where someone sees every imperfect, complicated part of you and still chooses you. The kind of certainty that proves unconditional love exists beyond the pages of Jane Eyre.

For years, I’ve craved the kind of love that feels like a place where you can finally rest. The kind where you don’t lie awake wondering if they’ll leave, if they’ll wake up one morning and suddenly feel differently, or if you’re unknowingly counting down to the moment they change their mind.

I want a love where I can build a life with someone. Where their presence becomes so woven into my everyday life that I struggle to imagine the world without them.

And I know how that sounds.

I know it could be mistaken for dependency. For believing I need someone else to complete me, as though I’m somehow broken and love is the only thing capable of fixing me.

But that’s not what this is.

I don’t need love to survive.

But I want love.

I want it more than I can explain. Maybe more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

And somehow, despite believing in it so deeply, it always seems to remain just out of reach.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve come close.

When I put the disappointment, anger and sadness aside, there are men I know I have loved.

But I don’t think I can call it the kind of love I’ve always dreamed of, because every one of those relationships required me to become a version of myself that felt easier to love.

Smaller.

Quieter.

Less emotional.

Less complicated.

Less… me.

I don’t want the kind of love that comes with hidden terms and conditions.

I want the kind of love where two people, despite their baggage, trauma and scars, choose each other every single day.

Because love is inconvenient, messy and uncomfortable at times.

It seems this is the part I keep getting stuck at.

Finding someone who wants to build that stupid IKEA bed with me, even through losing the stupid little Allen keys and following instructions that seem deliberately designed to test your relationship.

Someone who watches the way I eat so fast I give myself hiccups and finds it endearing.

Someone who, despite all my flaws, couldn’t imagine a life without me.

A little while ago, I met someone I really did love.

Or at least, I loved the version of us that I believed we could become.

It ended because we couldn’t communicate. We were two people carrying our own insecurities, trying to love each other without first learning how to understand one another.

The difference was, I wanted to fight for us.

I gave him the cinematic declaration.

The boombox outside the window moment.

The kind of scene that, in a film, would be met with a dramatic kiss in the rain. The kind where, if the love interest walked away, everyone in the cinema would quietly decide he was the villain.

But life isn’t written by Nora Ephron.

There was no classical crescendo before his lips crashed into mine.

No last-minute sprint through the airport.

No perfectly timed epiphany when he sees something that reminds him of her.

He listened.

And he walked away.

Not long afterwards, he started dating an Australian model.

And I’d be lying if I said that didn’t hurt.

It felt like the final credits had rolled and the girl who wasn’t chosen was left standing in the rain, watching through the window as the boy she loved kissed someone else.

The screen fades to black.

The audience goes home.

But she’s still standing there, stuck in a limbo of longing, wondering why she wasn’t enough to make him stay.

Looking back now, I don’t think I was mourning him as much as I was mourning the fact that, yet again, someone had seen my imperfections and decided they could live without me.

I won’t lie to you, lately I’ve felt like giving up.

I used to pity the young girl who thought love would be easy.

But now I envy her ignorance.

I know I’ve loved before, and I know I’ll love again.

Maybe one day someone will choose the girl who watches Barbie films when she’s sad, listens to medieval podcasts in the bath, and thinks she can drink way too many gin and tonics without being tipsy.

Or maybe they won’t.

That’s the terrifying thing about love.

There are no guarantees.

But I refuse to believe that’s a reason to stop wanting it, to stop searching just because of fear.

Because if I’ve learnt anything, it’s that love isn’t remarkable because it’s inevitable.

It’s remarkable because it isn’t.