Just a Girl in Love–Differently

When the fairy tales fade, but with faith, love still finds a way.

Just a girl, in love

The Romance We Were Raised On

Ever since I could remember, I’ve always loved love. Though I had no real-life examples of love around me, I loved it nonetheless, or what I believed it to be. If you’re a woman born in the 90s, you probably loved love too. How could you not? It was embedded in everything we watched, everything we listened to. Romance was the order of the day.

Storybook Love vs. Real-Life Lessons

Movies from the early 2000s really did a number on us, setting unrealistic expectations and feeding the belief in “Happily Ever After.” Films like A Walk to Remember, where the troubled, popular bad boy Landon falls in love with the geeky, terminally ill Jamie. Loving her made him turn his life around—a change for the greater good. They got married as teenagers. Jamie married the man of her dreams, in her mother’s wedding dress, in the same church her parents were married. She died shortly after. Landon went off to medical school, something he was never interested in before falling in love with Jamie. He even visits her father sometimes, years after she passed. Truly, a love everlasting.

Thinking back on it now as I write this, terminally ill or not, what parent would really allow their teenage children to get married? Either way, movies like that carried love so heavy that for not one second did you even think about the characters having sex. Just the innocence of love.

And there began my downfall.

With a list of favourites like the one I just mentioned, plus The Notebook, Me Before You, Dear John, Love, Rosie, Pretty in Pink, P.S. I Love You... my choice in entertainment doomed me from the start when it came to expectations about love. The books I was reading didn’t help either. Because how could authors like Danielle Steel and Cecelia Ahern write about a love so magnifying that it could only be make-believe?

I always felt as though it should have been easy—at least the falling in love part. I’d lock eyes with a stranger from across the room and just know, that was the love of my life. Or I’d bump into him in a crowded bar while he was taking drinks back to his table (mind you, bars aren’t even like that in Jamaica, and I don’t often go to bars). Or maybe we’d be childhood friends who realized, later in life, that we’d always loved each other.

“It was you,” he’d say. “It’s always been you.”

And then we’d share a passionate, warm kiss under the moonlight of a summer night.

All these scenarios… all these versions of me falling in love, influenced by entertainment.

Not that I’m mad at it. As a woman in her early 30s, I can look back at it now with a sense of light humour. I’m happy I believed in something—at least.

But have I stopped believing in love?

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

I’m currently single, have been for five years, and I’m divorced. (The movies never really taught us how to stay in love.) Given what prompted my divorce, you'd say I have a very rational reason to never want to be in love again. But I don’t feel that way. I just see love differently now. I’ve experienced it differently.

When Love Is Loss

I think my truest understanding of love came when I lost my father. I always knew I loved him—he raised me, after all. But I never really measured how deep that love ran until I lost him. I can only imagine how much worse the realization of love must’ve been for him when we lost my brother. I had never seen my father cry—until then. And so, I started to see love differently.

The loss of my father, still one of the most painful things I’ve ever had to live through, opened me up to love more deeply.

Death has a way of forcing you to see things differently. My father dying a year before my marriage blew up actually made dealing with the divorce a lot easier. Because what could be harder, or hurt more, than saying goodbye—permanently—to someone you love?

And so, I changed how I love. I realize now that we are capable of loving just about anyone. It’s a choice.

Redefining Love Through Faith

Entertainment taught us that love is this sacred thing that should be reserved for only certain people. A parent. A spouse. A child. Some relatives. But why? Love is one of the freest things you can give. And as someone who’s also working on her faith, I’m beginning to understand why it was so easy for Jesus to love freely. His love wasn’t based on conditions, expectations, or reciprocation. He never had to ration his love—it came from abundance.

And believe what you want, I respect that, but Jesus is the perfect example of what it means to just love.

I didn’t expect this to get spiritual (I’m just writing from the heart and it led me here), but I think for us, love can be hard because it makes us vulnerable. I honestly think our whole human experience does. Love makes us vulnerable, and people can and will disappoint us or take advantage of that.

I’m not sure how to help you navigate that. Discernment and the occasional forgiveness are things I’m still practicing. But I’ve truly found peace in this kind of love. It has made me kinder, slower to anger, and quicker to forgive.

Love as a Daily Practice

Now I experience love in everything.

The love I share with my best friends, my siblings, my nieces and nephews. The love I see in a stranger smiling at me. The love I see in someone helping another person cross the street. The love I feel when I give someone a hug. The love and understanding I now have for my mother, as a woman just doing her best playing the hand she was dealt. 

Jesus offered that love to everyone, the poor, the powerful, the sinner, the saint, even His enemies. (I’m working on that bit.)

Learning to Love Freely and Fully

I often think now that our highest calling as people is to love.

I sound like a simpleton, don’t I? I don’t mind. Friends have often called me an idealist. And that might just be true. I don’t have the capacity to hate. Or maybe life just hasn’t dragged me down to that point yet, I don’t know.

But what could really be the harm in opening yourself to love, and just loving—freely?

Corinthians 13:4-8

New International Version

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."