OFF MY CHEST: Discovering and loving myself this Valentine’s

Love has always been mysterious to me. The layered kind of mystery that gets me overthinking.

I admire couples, especially those that seem to be genuinely in love.

One of my honorary big sisters, a practical and very sober academic, tells me that she fights with her boyfriend, and sometimes they do not talk for weeks.

As she proceeds to explain to me how the matter eventually resolves, I am usually stuck to “How do you hurt each other and then talk again? What kind of thing is that?”

Love has never been something that I feel; I recently learnt it was because I tried to feel it the way my friends tell me they feel it.

I understand love intellectually; the same way we understand lessons on cultural anthropology or whatever discipline tickles your fancy.

Love for me is something I (can) use; not something that I feel in the syrupy, soapy way that my friends keep prodding me ‘to find out if I do’ anytime they see a guy next to me.

And this has nothing to do with a decision I made.

VERY FUNNY

When my classmates in primary school started getting paired, Carol with Dismas, Sharon with Connan, David with Winnie, Eunice with Davis... It was all very funny. We were in Class Eight at the time. I was 12. Listening to secretive conversations about how someone did not sleep because of a certain boy and how she had listened to a song that reminded her of him or how she was caned at home for spending a little too much time with the boy but she was not about to change because she loved the said boy so much made me laugh so much. Even then, I did not believe a thing like that could happen to me.  10 years later, Kelvin would confess to me that he struggled so hard to get my attention when we were in primary school. Please note, I was not ignoring him, I just never noticed him that way. And that (not noticing) is the same story with Kwama and some other guy in my undergraduate whose name I have forgotten.

Many times, I wondered if I was normal. I struggled to feel love the way my friends did.

I have now accepted that my loving does not come in the same manual as my friends’.

I’m exactly sixteen days shy of my 26th birthday and one of the things that I will be celebrating is understanding myself and permitting me to love my way – to do love on my own terms.

PERSONALITY TYPE

For example, I now know who I am: an ESTJ.

ESTJ means I am Extroverted, I am a Sensor, I prefer Thinking (rather than feeling) and I Judge – I like to be sure of what I am getting into, I do not like ambiguity or uncertainty and I am not the most adventurous person you will meet in your life.

Understanding the Thinking and Judging traits were the highlights; I am starting to be freer and open to loving in a different way without putting pressure on a guy to love me in a way that has been presented as the standard, but which I will not appreciate ultimately.

Maybe that is what has been wrong with the guys that tried to date me in the past: there was no click and it was no one’s fault.

I have been ESTJ for the most part. According to the Myer Briggs personality spectrum, the way that people see the world has a lot to do with who they innately are. I series of events in the past year made me want to find out who I really am. That got me into so much research.

Getting to this point means I defined what the idea of love means to me, and as I did self-reflection, here is what I found:

A strong emotional connection equals love to me. I have a problem being vulnerable, mostly because I never have been vulnerable with a guy.

The only thing that can convince me to be vulnerable is if I feel emotionally connected to a guy.

No amount of flowers or chocolate can make me vulnerable and I do not think I can truly love without being vulnerable.
So, what would that connection look like?

I really do not know. It is one of those things that we know it when we see them. But I think it looks like...me really wanting to speak to someone. I am the fastest and most talkative person I know. But this talkativeness is in reference to specific contexts where I talk about work or general conversations. Trust me, I can talk about Chimamanda’s books for 10 hours straight. However, it is only a feeling of emotional connection with someone that can make me really and truly want to spend time with them and fully enjoy their company. And truly in this context means that someone I can talk to about my fears, someone I can comfortably let my guard down when I am with and relive my childhood and someone who can see all the shades of me and be open to showing me all the shades of who they are.

I have a suggestion, spend this Valentine’s getting intimate with yourself.

Who are you, like seriously? Why do you react to situations the way that you do? What makes you truly happy and what does love mean to you?

Happy Valentine’s people and love forward.