I keep giving myself to men who arenât you and it hurts. I keep having to convince myself that this is what 20-somethings do; they send flirty texts and naughty pictures, they date Mr. Right Now fully aware that heâs not you, and theyâre fine with it because thatâs just what 20-somethings do.
(Found this today..I don't know who this woman is but she's baring my soul & I'm not sure I know how I feel about it.)
1. âYou fell off the face of the Earth!â is not a thing anybody wants to hear. A suitable alternative would be: âI havenât heard from you in a while, how are you?â (Just because somebody isnât interacting with you doesnât mean they cease to exist.)
2. âI need to be alone for a whileâ does not always mean âI need to be away from you.â A personâs desire for âme timeâ doesnât exist in proportion to how much they hate you that day. Youâll save yourself a lot of anxiety if you just learn this now.
3. The people who like to be alone are very often the people who have to spend a lot of time with others, or who are often outgoing and social.
4. âŠÂ Which is why it can seem out of character when they suddenly retreat from a party, donât text you for a few days, abruptly say they just need their space for a bit. (Theyâre not mad at you, theyâre recouping.)
5. They arenât less emotional than anyone else, theyâre just emotionally independent, which means that they usually know better than to base their day-to-day state of mind on whether or not somebody is giving them time or attention or validation or love.
6. They know that the secret to making any relationship work is to have a healthy amount of time away from each other.
7. They have a sincere appreciation for books and music and the fantastical wonderland of their thoughts and ideas and imaginations.
8. They know that the baseline of any experience is their mindset about it, and so they take time and careful effort in cultivating that. Theyâre big on self-improvement, even if they donât use that term to describe it. They want to see more, understand more, learn more, be more.
9. They tend to be indecisive, or rather, decisive but only after an extended period of time considering the options, and coming to a logical, well-thought-out solution.
10. (Theyâre critical thinkers, and in some/most/many cases, over-thinkersâŠ)
11. They are sincere lovers and phenomenal partners. They want to get to know you. Theyâre more interested in who you are than what you appear to be. Theyâre exceptional at cultivating intimacy, because when they let somebody into their inner world, they expect that it really means something.
12. Theyâre introspective. Theyâll return home at the end of the day to lay down and meditate on what happened, how they felt about it, what it means to them, and how they want to change their experiences going forward.
13. Itâs really difficult to ask for alone time. You never know how people are going to respond when you ask to take a quiet drive at dusk or read side-by-side or write alone for a while by yourself, which is why people tend to covet the time they do get.
14. Their ideal relationships are the ones in which their lives coexist with their partners, not merge, as so many people aspire to.
15. They tend to be very sensitive, but they put up a tough front. When they feel things, they feel them entirely, but theyâd rather sort and think through them and cope on their own, as opposed to being all over the place with their personal lives.
16. Theyâre some mix of barely using social media and signing onto Facebook once a month and bogging their every thought on some private Tumblr account that youâll never know about. Do not put any of this past them.
17. They care about people so much that they tend to give them all of their attention. Itâs for this reason that their most profound experiences often happen alone, itâs when and how they give that attention to whatâs happening in front of them.
"If travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because itâs a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end"
Pico Iyer, ââWhy We Travelââ (via roadlessco)