I won’t call it love if it isn’t

So it’s Valentine’s Day — a day I’ve grown estranged from, as if it belonged to a language I once spoke fluently and have since forgotten. I scroll past the declarations, the curated tenderness, the proof-of-love posts by couples, and feel an involuntary irony rise in me. Just wait until the blindfold comes off, I think. Not cruelly but with the weary realization of someone who has mistaken dim light for dawn before.

It isn’t that I don’t believe in love. It’s that the loves I’ve lived inside have always come up short — reaching toward me, but never quite arriving.

I wasn’t always like this. There was a time I believed I was loved well — or at least, that what I was given was the shape of love. But even that, in the end, failed to meet the quiet, unspoken standards of my open heart. And I don’t know whether to be grateful or resentful that, though men did not fulfill me, they educated me. They taught me what fulfillment must include: reciprocity, presence, commitment — the steady architecture of being chosen in daylight, not just desired at night time. I refuse to be a passing fancy. 

That knowledge did not soften me, though. It raised my walls even higher. It made me guard my worth with a vigilance that sometimes feels indistinguishable from loneliness.

My skepticism is not born only of memory but of witness. Day after day, as I watch love “performed” in public and on social media — partners praising each other in captions while fractures show at the seams, devotion declared in pixels while faithfulness falters in private. I know some of these stories. I know the silences behind their smiles, the arguments sealed behind doors. Their posts may glow, but the truth flickers.

Love is messy, I know this. But I would rather be alone than live in a farce. When I see so much love rendered hollow or theatrical, something in me recoils. I grow distant. I fold inward. I begin to fear the very thing I still, stubbornly, believe in.

I’ve seen too much to settle. I don’t need rescue from my choices, but sometimes I imagine that one day someone will show up at my door. Someone whose presence quiets my doubt instead of awakening it. Someone who does not change my standards, but who finally meets them.

But until then, I live suspended between belief and skepticism — a romantic who has not stopped believing in love, only in the likelihood that there is a man who can meet me fully within it.