Love, Unpolished - by Dolapo Oludairo

Love is not what happens when someone chooses you.That’s attention. That’s relief. That’s sometimes desperation wearing a tuxedo.Real love begins much earlier than romanceand much later than attraction.It begins the moment you stop confusing intensity for intimacyand start recognizing safety as something radical.Love is not how loudly someone feels about you.It’s how gently they treat your inner lifewhen they realize how easy it would be to damage it.Love is restraint.It is the decision not to exploit access.Not to weaponize vulnerability.Not to use what someone trusted you withas leverage when you are disappointed, bored, or afraid.People think love is passion.But passion burns fast and demands very little discipline.Love is the slow, often inconvenient commitmentto remain honest even when lying would preserve comfort.Love is not the absence of conflict.It is the refusal to turn conflict into cruelty.It is arguing without trying to win ownership over another person’s spirit.It is saying I am angry without saying you are disposable.Love is realizing that another human being is not a solution.They are not a cure.They are not a replacement for the work you are afraid to do alone.Love collapses the moment someone becomes responsible for saving you from yourself.True love does not rescue.It stands beside.It witnesses.It allows you to be seen without insisting on control as the price of that visibility.Love is the courage to let someone changewithout interpreting their growth as abandonment.It is understanding that people are not vows carved in stone,but living things that will expand, contradict themselves, and surprise you.Love does not require shrinking.The moment you feel yourself becoming smaller to be kept,you are no longer loving — you are negotiating your survival.Love is the place where effort is mutualand sacrifice is not one‑sided tradition disguised as virtue.It is where exhaustion is noticed, not praised.Where silence is checked on, not exploited.Love is not proven by endurance alone.Staying is not holy if staying costs you your dignity.Longevity does not equal truth.History does not justify harm.Love is being able to sayI don’t understand you right nowwithout needing to punish the distance that understanding requires.Love is freedom that does not threaten closeness.It is space without abandonment.It is intimacy without possession.And perhaps the most uncomfortable truth of all:love is not guaranteed to feel good.But it should never make you feel erased.When love is real,you do not feel like a role.You do not feel like a function.You do not feel like something that must perform usefulness to earn rest.You feel human.Flawed. Complex. Allowed.Anything less than thatmay be desire, attachment, habit, fear, or longing —but it is not love.

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