why you should fall in love with someone who brings out the worst in you

If I had never met you, would I be happier? 

I'd be spending my days dreaming of being instafamous, spending my nights getting dressed up, feeling beautiful and flirting with strangers. Maybe doing some good deeds here and there. Focusing on work or whatever. Thinking of the good I can do for the general public, but also thinking a lot about myself and what would make me happy. I'd be feeling generally good about myself.

But I didn't never meet you. I met you. And I fell hard.

And falling meant facing a side of myself I like to carefully forget.

Growing up, girls hear a lot about "the man they are going to marry one day." Like it or not.

"Make sure you marry someone who treats his mother well."

"Make sure you marry someone who opens every door for you."

"Make sure you marry someone who brings out the best in you."

Add on a few well intentioned Disney movies viewed when our brains are soft and developing, and you have the perfect recipe for high expectations of love looking something like a man who kisses you when you are fast asleep and unconscious, who then whisks you off into the sunset bareback on a horse. If you ask me, "perfect" love sounds both creepy and painful.

And then you grow up, and put on your big girl pants and really fall in love.

And it turns out that love comes in more than 50 shades of gray. It's a freaking tornado designed to rip apart the layers of your very being, often showing us the ugliest side of others and ourselves.

History shows us time and time again that the natural state of mankind is laced with selfishness. We grow increasingly self-absorbed as society places its focus on the individual. We live in a culture of "you do you" and "I'mma love myself." As much as I believe we need to put on our own oxygen mask before we can save someone else, I also see that society is shaping our self conscious to take it one step further, refusing to put that oxygen mask on anyone else at all. MORE AIR FOR ME. 

Love is the only force to fight that toxicity of selfishness.

But while love might be the antidote to selfishness, it also is the greatest teacher of our flaws.

Love is a light that shines through us, illuminating our cracks and our flaws.

And being in love with you, was like sunlight hitting stained glass. Everything shone, including my shortcomings.

I found out that I am at an infantile level when it comes to trusting. I can be a little jealous. Sometimes I am fault-finding, and I am fickle and indecisive. I can be a tad too quick to react, slow to think and quick to speak. I can let emotions get the best of me. I shut down and overreact and have walls to put the greatest one in China to shame. 

And with a different man, perhaps it would be different. 

But it wasn't a different man, it was you. 

And it got real and raw and ugly and also kind of wonderful.

You bugged the hell out of me. You were a TON of work. And I let you know it. 

And I am so grateful for that. Because there isn't a second that goes by where I feel like us meeting wasn't precisely planned for us both. Another undiscovered layer of my soul that I could only have been introduced to by you. You broke down my ego, shook up my plans, showed me my barriers and my addictions and my imperfections. You broke open my heart and let light fill places that were dark before. I don't feel "generally good about myself." I feel specific, precise, controlled love for myself. I feel love and compassion and understanding for every piece of me.

And I feel that love for you too.

Someone once told me that you can't fully love someone else until you learn how to love yourself.

But sometimes I think they got that backwards.

Perhaps you can't fully love yourself until you learn how to love someone else.

Because realizing how much I could love an imperfect yet also so stunningly spectacular human being, made me see that I am worthy of that love too. 

Love is not a magical ride into the sunset, or a kiss that saves your life. And the term "happy ending" is nonsensical. Love isn't designed for perfect people who love perfectly. 

It's for the screw ups like you and me