The Women in My Family Never Waited for Love
"Back then, I wasn't really able to love someone properly. Yet, I couldn't help but want to be loved."
When I first heard that line from Nana, it felt less like dialogue and more like a confession somebody had stolen directly from the tip of my tongue. Not because I had loved greatly and lost greatly, but because I had spent years wanting to be loved with an intensity that sometimes bordered obsession. Looking back, I don't think I was obsessed with romance itself. I was obsessed with what romance seemed to promise. To be loved, in all the stories I consumed, was to be seen. It was to be chosen. It was to become significant in the eyes of another person without first having to earn it through achievements, productivity, beauty, or sacrifice. I wanted that feeling so badly that I began collecting it in fragments. A glance became a possibility. A compliment became a sign. A conversation became a chapter. I was a starving person learning to survive on crumbs, convincing myself each crumb was no less than a feast.
The strange thing is that I was never the stereotypical romantic. I was practical, ambitious, sensible, and often dismissive of romance in public. Whenever my friends discussed boys, I played a familiar role. One friend would talk about a man who asked for her number at a café. Another would complain about the classmate who clearly had a crush on her. Someone else would show screenshots of messages she pretended to find annoying despite smiling through the entire conversation. Eventually somebody would ask me what was new in my life. I always had the same answer. I would laugh and tell them I didn't have time for any of that. I had exams to prepare for, careers to build, goals to achieve, and a future to secure. My friends admired this version of me or they pretended too. They called me focused. They called me driven. They told me I had my priorities straight. For a few moments, I almost believed them.
Then I would return home, lie in bed, open social media, watch edits of fictional men desperately in love, and imagine entire futures with people who did not know I existed, embarrassing but true. The truth was far less pious than the image I projected. I wasn't too busy building a life to think about romance. I was thinking about romance constantly. The embarrassing part was that I wasn't even building the life I kept claiming to prioritize. I wasn't studying every waking hour. I wasn't becoming exceptional. I wasn't conquering the world. I was simply waiting. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting for somebody to notice me. Waiting for someone to choose me at my worst. Waiting for evidence that I was desirable. Waiting for my life to begin.
I think many women understand this kind of waiting. It hides itself beneath self-improvement plans and productivity systems. It disguises itself as ambition. Yet underneath all of it is a quiet belief that life will finally feel real once someone chooses us. We imagine ourselves becoming disciplined after love arrives. We imagine ourselves becoming beautiful after love arrives. We imagine ourselves becoming confident after love arrives. We imagine ourselves becoming worthy after love arrives. The fantasy is never truly about the man. The fantasy is about the version of ourselves we believe his affection will create. At the end of the day , it's always been about you, your acceptance of yourself.
My grandmother would have laughed at this. She belonged to a generation of women who did not spend much time discussing love. They discussed wars , harvests, illnesses, children, debts, marriages, and how to feed the stomachs of their children. Romance was rarely mentioned. When I was younger, I mistook this for emotional poverty. I thought they had simply been denied the great love stories that fill books and films. It took me years to realize that many of them had discovered something I was still struggling to learn.
One evening, while helping my grandmother shell peas, I asked whether she had ever wanted something so badly that she couldn't stop thinking about it. I expected a story about marriage or youth or one of the countless family legends that seemed to emerge whenever she started talking about the past. Instead, she told me about a sewing machine. For years, she had wanted one. She calculated the cost repeatedly. She imagined where she would place it. She planned dresses she would sew and repairs she would make. Every month she grew a little closer to owning it. Finally, after years of anticipation, she bought it. When she finished the story, I asked what happened next. She looked at me as though the answer were obvious. Nothing happened next. The sewing machine sat in the corner exactly where she had imagined it would. She used it. Life continued.
At the time, I found the story disappointing. Years later, I finally understood what she had been trying to tell me. Human beings are often intoxicated by anticipation. We become obsessed not with possession but with possibility. We dream about what might happen because uncertainty is exciting. My grandmother never spent years fantasizing about the sewing machine after she owned it. It became ordinary. The anticipation vanished the moment certainty arrived. The same is true of so many things. We think endlessly about jobs we haven't gotten, relationships that haven't begun, opportunities that haven't materialized, and futures that remain hypothetical. The wanting becomes larger than the having.
I began noticing this pattern everywhere. Wealthy people rarely spend their evenings imagining designer handbags because they can simply buy them if they wish. Children who are loved do not stay awake wondering whether their parents love them because they have never had reason to doubt it. People whose lives are filled with affection are often less obsessed with romance than those who have spent years searching for evidence of it. The heart pounds most fiercely in the presence of uncertainty. It races when there is a possibility of obtaining something we do not believe belongs to us. It races when we think somebody might like us. It races when we think a dream might finally come true. It races because we do not know.
That realization forced me to confront a painful question. What exactly was I longing for? Was I longing for a relationship, or was I longing for proof? Proof that I was beautiful enough. Proof that I was desirable enough. Proof that I was worthy enough. If a stranger looked at my friend with admiration, I remembered it for weeks. If nobody looked at me, I remembered that too. There is a particular loneliness in standing beside beautiful women and realizing they move through a different world. I once watched a man become visibly flustered while giving directions to a friend of mine. She barely noticed. For her, such interactions were ordinary. For me, they felt almost mythical. I went home wondering what it must feel like to inspire fascination without effort. I wasn't jealous of her. I was mourning an experience I had never had.
The stories we consume often make this longing worse. We are told again and again about heroes who fall in love with overlooked women. We are promised that somebody will eventually recognize our hidden value. We are taught that love arrives like a reward for goodness. Yet the women in these stories are rarely as ordinary as they claim to be. The supposedly unattractive heroine is still beautiful. The supposedly unnoticed woman is still extraordinary. Fiction tells us that we will be chosen, and because we desperately want to believe it, we keep reading. We keep hoping. We keep waiting.
What nobody tells us is that waiting can become a way of abandoning our lives. One day I realized that I had spent years imagining future versions of myself instead of becoming them. I had imagined the disciplined woman. The healthy woman. The confident woman. The accomplished woman. In every version of the fantasy, somebody loved her. It took me an embarrassingly long time to ask why she needed a witness at all. Why couldn't I become her simply because I wanted her life?
My grandmother gave me the answer long before I was ready to hear it. Shortly before she died, she told me something I dismissed at the time because it sounded too simple. She said that everybody feels lonely eventually and that the only solution is to make your life bigger than your loneliness. At twenty, I wanted a more romantic answer. I wanted proof that somebody would arrive and fix everything. At twenty-five, I think she may have been right. The goal is not to eliminate loneliness. The goal is to build a life so rich with purpose, relationships, responsibilities, curiosity, and experience that loneliness no longer occupies the entire landscape.
This is not an essay about giving up on love. I still think romantic love is beautiful. I still think there is something miraculous about two people choosing one another repeatedly across decades. If that kind of love arrives in my life, I will welcome it with gratitude. What I am giving up is the waiting. I am giving up the habit of turning breadcrumbs into jewels. I am giving up the stories I write in my head whenever somebody is merely kind. I am giving up the belief that my life begins after I become lovable enough.
For the first time, I am willing to consider another possibility. Perhaps my life is already happening. Perhaps it has been happening all along while I stood at the window looking for someone to arrive. Perhaps the inheritance the women in my family were trying to pass down was never about romance at all. Perhaps it was the knowledge that a woman cannot afford to postpone her existence. She must study, work, learn, fail, travel, nurture friendships, care for herself, care for others, gather stories, and build a life that remains meaningful regardless of who enters it. Love may come. Love may not come. Either way, the years will pass.
I do not want to spend them waiting.
