Love

Everyone wants to be loved.  Whether they are a child or an adult or even somewhere in between, love is something we all crave, whether we admit it or not.  I know I do.  I know my best friend does.  Admittedly we all look for it in different places and in different ways, but at the end of the day it all comes down to the same thing.  Finding it isn’t the only problem though.

Over the last few weeks, I have realised that love also means different things to different people.  And of course, there are different types of love.

Firstly, and probably the most important of all is familial love.  The love a parent feels for a child, that the child feels for their parents and for their siblings.  This love lays the groundwork for how a child will develop and determines who they will be as an adult.

Then there is the love that we feel for our friends, both male and female.  This is obviously also critical.  Without developing these caring friendships during childhood, it is impossible for someone then to grow up into a balanced adult.

And naturally, there is romantic love.  The love that binds two people together through good times and bad and is the most fragile love of all.

How we perceive these different types of love develops as we move through our lives and experience differing relationships.  And of course it follows that any difficult relationship experienced in our formative years will have a profound effect on our views in later life.

I am by no means a professional analyst, nor any type of expert in terms of psychology, but my personal experiences have not only left me badly scarred, but also with a perspective unique to those with similar experiences.

The strangest part is that I can see it so clearly.  I craved the love of my parents in so many different ways and it has taken me years to realise that I had their love all along, I just couldn’t see it.  Because it was not demonstrated in the way that I had seen in families around me.  I watched my friends and relatives hug their children, cuddle them close when they were sad and express their love in words that could be plainly understood.

But my parents were not like that.  They didn’t show physical affection nor did they speak of it.  At least, not to me or my brother.  I know now that they loved me, but this knowledge would have made a profound difference if I had come upon it whilst I was still a child.

I don’t blame them, I am sure I have said this before.  But this hole in my life made me a target for a predatory swine, whose actions then determined the path for the next 33 years of my life. 

And I do blame him.  I hold him totally responsible.  As a result of his actions, I became a child isolated from my friends and separated from my parents by a lie that I could not share with them.

 

His lies also led me to associate sex with love.  Not by any assumption on my part, but because he told me that he did these horrible things to me because he loved me.  How sick is that?  And because I was too young to know better, I believed him.

So I took that belief into my teenage years and allowed myself to become a toy for any young man to play with and abandon once they had what they wanted.  I remember so many days, sitting waiting for the phone to ring after allowing a man to use me the night before and crying quietly to myself as I realised that I had been used again.  But because of Alex, the belief that sex and love was the same thing was deeply ingrained, so off I would go again, allowing someone else to use me and discard me.

Even now, looking back, it hurts me so much to realise that I allowed myself to be used so badly and to accept that there were so many men out there who were happy to take advantage.  I wonder whether any of them ever stopped to think of how they were hurting me or to wonder why I behaved as I did?  Do any of them look back now and regret the way that they used me?

I have so many regrets about the way that I have lived my life.  I know that I need to accept it and move on, but I fear that nothing will ever be able to take the pain away.  I just wish there was a way that I could turn back the clock and live my life again, whilst still retaining the knowledge that I have now.

Maybe then it would be possible for me to believe that anyone could ever love me.