The Wounds We Learn to Love

In pursuit of love, you do not just chase a person.

You chase their childhood.

You look for the places they were hurt, hoping that if you understand the wound, you will understand them.

You convince yourself that love is learning how someone broke and choosing to stay anyway.

No one tells you this when you are younger.

They just tell you that love should feel natural, effortless, destined.

But what you learn instead is that love is curiosity.

It is patience.

It is sitting with someone’s silence and realising it was formed long before you arrived.

Your first love teaches you the most.

Not because it lasts forever, but because it opens everything.

They show you how vast the world is, how much there is to feel, how deeply you are capable of caring.

They make life feel larger than your body, louder than your fears.

Through them, you learn beauty.

The kind that makes ordinary days glow.

And almost at the same time, you learn cruelty.

How easily someone can leave.

How quickly certainty can dissolve.

People come and go.

Some arrive gently and leave you better than they found you.

They leave behind fond memories, quiet laughter, and stars drawn carefully over your scars.

They teach you that love can be soft even when it ends.

Others leave differently.

They take pieces of you with them.

They leave questions that echo for years.

They teach you that love can bruise as deeply as it heals.

Still, you would not undo it.

Because loving them changed you.

It made you softer where you once armoured yourself.

It made you braver where you once hid.

It taught you how to feel the world fully, even when it hurts.

To love someone is to accept that you will never leave untouched.

That every connection shapes you in ways you only understand later.

That some wounds become lessons.

And some lessons become part of who you are.

And maybe that is the quiet truth you carry now.

That the people who mattered did not stay forever.

But they stayed long enough to teach you how to love,

and how to survive loving.