Love won’t fix you

A few months ago, I told a guy I was seeing that I was on medication for clinical depression, and he responded, “You don’t need to take those. You’ll be happy when you’re with me. I’ll be your living antidepressant.” A couple of days later, he kissed the scars on my skin and whispered, “I won’t let you hurt yourself again. Promise me you won’t.” I tried very hard not to cringe and promised. 

I’m not sure how much of that second remark was half-conscious pillow talk, but it lingered in my mind. It would have been exactly what I wanted to hear when I was 16, 18, or even 20, and to be honest I still found it a little charming. For a long time, I was convinced that love would be the magical antidote to all my problems, that it—and it alone—could ‘fix’ me. Once I found that cure and swallowed the fairytale potion from its glass vial, I would open my eyes to a world transformed. The sun would be warmer, the grass would be greener, the mornings would be brighter, and the nights would be safe cocoons of intimate comfort rather than caverns of precarious, fearful isolation. I, too, would be made anew by love’s spell, with no more sadnesses, no more worries, no more insecurities, nothing left for me to face alone, and nothing that I couldn’t be rescued from. I would be healed, saved, and solved. 

This fantasy had been inscribed in my mind since childhood and was endlessly reinforced throughout my teenage years by the formulaic love stories that dominate modern media. Disney movies, K-dramas, catchy love songs, and bestselling romance novels often portray an emotionally wounded protagonist being rescued from her troubled life by an unexpected saviour. His unconditional, all-accepting love heals her heart of its deepest insecurities.

I desperately consumed it all, hoping that someday it might happen to me. Even if I couldn’t fix myself, I believed someone else would. Convinced of my own helplessness and the fundamental dependence of the feminine victim, I locked myself in a tower of unaddressed problems and waited for a saviour to find me. I waited for them to fight the legions of dragons, scale the stone walls, and appear like a modern knight on the doorstep of my life. This saviour, this ‘right person,’ this storybook prince would surely solve everything. He would wake me from a terrorised slumber, bring a candle into the darkest corners of my mind-tower, and dispel the shape-shifting shadows. He would deliver me from the cold fortress, show me what it meant to be warm, and piece me back together like a puzzle. 

These fairytale hopes coloured and ultimately undermined how I perceived love and my experiences of real-life relationships. Each romance, whether it was a casual flirtation or something more serious, inevitably fell short of my expectations. I would become disillusioned, disappointed, and terrified as the realities of love unfolded before me. Was it supposed to be this complicated? This uncertain? This frightening? Was it supposed to involve so much awkward confusion, so much vulnerability, and so much disagreement? Was I looking for the wrong person? Or was there something wrong with me? Yes, I thought, that had to be it; I was unlovable. There was too much damage to be repaired. I had built the tower too high. I was doomed to be alone forever, to be one unhealed half of an impossible whole. I had sought the wrong spell, drank the witch’s brew, and written a hex on my heart that cursed all the relationships I entered. 

Gradually, however, after multiple disenchanting experiences and bitter breakups, I realised it wasn’t me who carried this curse—it was the unrealistic hopes I harboured. I had expected love to be a one-size-fits-all solution, an age-old children’s tale with the character development already written in, a safe and predictable plotline, and guaranteed happy ending. I picked up the book anticipating Cinderella, straightforward and simple, complete with a fairy godmother to wave her transformative wand, mend the battered and bruised fabric of my life, and whisk me away into the arms of an idealised prince to bandage the wounds beneath—and instead I opened the cover to find myself mired in the labyrinthine depths of War and Peace, a maze of unmet expectations in which love was neither the guide nor exit. 

Now, after spending years in that maze, I’ve learned that I have to find the path to happiness alone. I’ve learned that fulfilment is not dependent on another person and that I don’t need to wait to be saved from my own life. I’ve learned that I have to be realistic with my relationships—if I choose to have them—while addressing my own problems, deciphering my own insecurities, and healing my own wounds. My life isn’t a puzzle to be solved by a fairytale lover; it’s something that I am building, piece by piece, on my own. It isn’t easy, it isn’t glamorous, and it looks nothing like the Disney movies I grew up watching, or the cute romance novels on BookTok. But I know it will be worth it because the story I write will be mine. And one day, I’ll flip to the beginning, open the cover, and read it through. I’ll laugh at the hopes I nurtured for each first date, sigh at the starry-eyed narratives I spun up, and cringe at the disillusioned separations that followed. When I reach the end, I’ll be proud that I carried myself through it all, held the weight of my own wearied heart, and taught it how to heal. I’ll smile at the tale of the girl who rescued herself from the tower. It’s taken a long time, but I’ve finally learned that I don’t need love to save me because I can save myself. I don’t need another person to make me whole because I’m already whole on my own. And so, dear reader, are you.

Editor’s Note: This article has been edited for clarity and to fix a grammatical error.