diary of an anti-lover girl

It’s not that we don’t want to. It’s just that we don’t know how.

cold. distant. difficult.

We’ve all heard it—at us, to us, about us—at least once.

Loving freely and openly isn’t in our nature. It’s not that we don’t want to. It’s just that we don’t know how.

As anti-lover girls, we don’t hate love. We just don’t trust it. We don’t trust ourselves with it.

We keep it at an arm’s length, measuring its weight, bracing for the moment it slips through our fingers. Because love always leaves, doesn’t it? Or worse—it stays, sees us in all our raw, unfiltered humanness, and decides we aren’t enough.

We are the girls who never needed help tying our shoes, who never cry in public, who never let anyone see us slip. The ones who built ourselves into something sturdy, self-sufficient, untouchable. We carry ourselves like steel and when love comes knocking, we hesitate at the door, fingers hovering over the lock.

Because what if love is just another thing we have to hold up? What if letting someone in means letting ourselves fall?

So we make it easy. We don’t ask for much. We don’t burden. We learn to hold ourselves up because it’s safer that way.

Because when you’ve spent a lifetime being the strong one, the reliable one, the one who doesn’t crack, how do you suddenly let yourself soften? How do you unlearn the fear that if you stop holding everything together, you’ll come undone?

The harsh words we pride ourselves on, have woven into our identity, come from the small moments. When someone reaches for our hand and we don’t pull away, but we dont squeeze back either. When someone says, You can talk to me, and we swallow the words instead. When love is offered, freely and gently, we stiffen under the weight of it, unsure how to hold something we’ve only ever admired from a distance.

Because when you’ve spent a lifetime being the strong one, the reliable one, the one who doesn’t crack, how do you suddenly let yourself soften? How do you unlearn the fear that if you stop holding everything together, you’ll come undone?

We never meant to be this way. We just learned early that love is fragile, that attachment comes with risk, that leaning on someone feels too much like gambling with something we can’t afford to lose. And so we became independent to a fault, mistaking self-reliance for safety. The older daughters, the quiet fixers, the strong ones, the ones who never wanted to be anyone’s problem.

We are afraid of feeling too much, of wanting too much. Afraid that if we let the floodgates open, we won’t know how to close them again. That if we let ourselves need, we will be left with empty hands.

So we burn with it. Alone.

Alone in the quiet of our own rooms, when the lights are off and no one is looking, we let ourselves think about it. What it might be like to lean, just once, and not be the one holding everything up. What it might be like to let someone run their fingers through our hair without stiffening at the touch. To hear I love you and believe it, instead of measuring its weight, instead of bracing for the moment it disappears.

Maybe one day we will. Maybe one day we’ll unclench our fists, let the words fall out, let someone stay.

But if love is freely given, then it can just as easily be taken away. And that terrifies us.

So we hover at the edge of it, hands half-outstretched, hearts half-closed. We let love orbit us, close but never quite close enough. We master the art of being wanted but never fully known.

It’s in the stolen glances, the almost-confessions, the way we linger in the warmth of someone’s presence just a second too long before retreating. It’s in the books we devour, the stories where love is earned in sharp words and reluctant touches, where devotion is pried from clenched fists. Because maybe that’s what we want, too. Not something soft and easy, but something that withstands the worst of us.

Maybe that’s why we love the enemies-to-lovers stories. Not for the longing, not even for the love itself, but for the proof that someone can see the worst of us and still choose us. Because in them, love is earned, fought for, deserved even at its most unlovable. Because someone sees every jagged piece and still reaches out, still chooses us.

Because that’s the secret, isn’t it? We don’t really want to be left alone with our sharp edges and guarded silences. We don’t want to be untouchable. We just want to be understood. We want someone to look at us and know why we hesitate before answering, why we deflect with sarcasm, why we take care of everyone else but refuse to be taken care of.

We want someone who doesn’t flinch when we pull away, who doesn’t mistake our quiet for indifference, who waits for us to reach out first but never stops making space for us to do so. Someone who sees our hands hovering over the lock and doesn’t walk away before we find the courage to turn it.

And maybe—maybe one day we will.

Maybe one day, we’ll step closer instead of away. Maybe we’ll let someone love us without making them prove they won’t leave first. Maybe we’ll believe that love doesn’t have to be a battle and doesn’t have to be something earned through hardship and restraint.

But until then, we pull away because we don’t know how to stay without breaking. Because in our hearts, the lover wants to trust, to surrender. But the anti-lover doesn’t know how to be weak, how to need someone without feeling like we’ve already lost. And so we pull back again.

The lover inside us dreams of connection, of warmth, of being seen, all of it. But the anti-lover always has its hand on the door, ready to close it at the first sign of hurt.

Until then, we will stand at the door, fingers hovering over the lock, heart pressing against the key.

The fear. The self-preservation instinct. The walls that come up before we can even realize we’ve built them.

Because we are the anti-lover girls, the ones who love in glances, in silences, in the spaces between words. The ones who love carefully, cautiously, like something that could shatter if held too tightly. Embarassed to express our emotion.

Half-open, half-guarded. Wanting, but never quite trusting.

Lover girls at heart. Anti-lover girls by design.