Let's face it. There's nothing romantic when you have to constantly endure unpredictable mood swings.
The media has romanticized the idea of loving a broken person so much that people became ignorant of the reality. The reality is anything but romantic.
Sure by the end of the day you might experience exhilarating emotions, seeing your other half getting better. You begin to credit yourself in helping them with their positive changes, just like in media portrayals. It seems inevitable that you're getting your forever ever after ending.
It's anything but that.
What the media doesn't show everyone is that chances are they will relapse - and - you have to undergo the whole process again. You will be facing same battles all over again. It's exhausting. It's self-detrimental.
Unprepared, loving a broken person can be self-destructive, agonizing, it’s toxicity running all through your body, it’s lying awake in bed at 2 AM with tears all over your pillow; it’s simply hell on Earth.
Loving a broken person is almost - or - even a full time job. You partially become a confidant, a caretaker and a giver to their needs. Their emotional needs especially. Relationship is about compromise but here you might be required to compromise more and at times even putting aside your own needs.
If you’re a complete person and you try to love a broken person, it’s going to be easy for you to get frustrated that you aren’t being loved in the same way you want to be loved. You will feel like you’re constantly having to take care of someone in a relationship, rather than being one half of an even partnership. It’s not the person’s fault; they simply do not have the capacity to love in the way someone needs to be loved. While they probably have a great heart, and have the best intentions, it’s just they can’t behave and act on those intentions in a way that gives justice to them. It’s this internal whirlwind — they love you and want to be with you, but they just don’t know how to right now, at least not in the way they know is going to make you 100% happy.
Broken or not, when a person falls in love again, they will fell head over heels like teenagers with no problem in the world. The rest would be something straight out of popular media, but for broken people it would not last. Ultimately, the brokenness in them eventually catches up.
This is not the kind of love you see in movies or books, nor is it romantic in any way. It’s not the story of two people who fall in love with each other, go out on romantic dates, texting all day, calling all night, constantly exchanging words of "I miss you" and "I love you". It’s not the live version of any romantic songs you had heard aired on the radios.
No.
Loving a broken person is one of the hardest, bravest things you can ever go through. It’s a series of battles that will change you forever, battles that few are strong enough to endure. Loving a broken person requires rivers of patience and oceans of love.
That’s why, if you choose to love a damaged person, you have to be patient with them, you have to be delicate, you have to make that first step too many times, you have to put their needs before you - but most importantly - you must have real feelings for them, feelings that will endure the challenges of time, feeling that will help you win the battles, feelings that will help you heal from battle scars.
Even if there was no influence from media portrayals, a whole person wiling to dive into a relationship with a broken person is because when they fall in love, they really in love. As simple as that. They're just in love, just like other people are. While their rational mind might be inherently aware of the dysfunction, their hearts will ignore those rational thoughts—the truth of the matter—because it has so much love to give to the other person. Their hearts have to shove all the rational thoughts to the curb to shut it up and allow the heart to do what it wants—love without a care in the world.
We can’t help whom we love and when we love them, right?