“I Don’t Know How to Let Someone Really Love Me”
“I want to be loved. I really do. But when someone actually tries—when they’re kind, when they’re steady—I pull away. I look for reasons to doubt them. I get cold, distant, or uncomfortable. I don’t know how to let someone really love me, even when I want to.”
Dear Layla,
I read your words and felt a long silence rise up in me. The kind that doesn’t come from a lack of things to say, but from recognition. From that quiet nod that happens in the bones.
There’s something so tender about the conflict you’re naming. Wanting love. Deeply. But shrinking from it when it finally arrives. Not because you’re broken, and not because you’re playing games—but because letting yourself be loved is more vulnerable than loving. Because love, when it’s real, is exposure.
Not the kind that flashes itself and demands attention. But the kind that slowly asks to sit beside the parts of you you’ve kept hidden, forgotten, shamed, or deemed too much. And that can be terrifying.
Especially if the love you’ve known in the past came with requirements. Or distance. Or confusion. If you had to earn it. If it was withdrawn when you were inconvenient. If it came wrapped in fear or control. If the hands that claimed to care also withheld, punished, or walked away.
You learn to adapt to that kind of love. You learn to shape yourself in the direction of approval. You learn to guard against disappointment before it has a chance to touch you.
So when someone comes along who doesn’t ask you to perform, who offers warmth without agenda, who sees you without trying to fix you—it can feel wrong.
Not bad wrong. Just unfamiliar. Like a language you once knew, but haven’t spoken in years.
And that’s the part no one tells you. Sometimes, when you finally receive what you’ve always needed, your first instinct is to reject it. Not because you don’t want it. But because your body, your nervous system, your emotional memory doesn’t know how to hold it yet.
It’s like trying to pour something sacred into a vessel that’s still shaped for survival.
And it makes sense.
Letting someone love you—really love you—means standing there as you are. With your contradictions. With your self-doubt. With the parts of you you wish you could hide. It means letting someone see the corners you usually tidy before guests arrive.
And when love doesn’t require you to shrink, when it doesn’t ask for a resume or an explanation, something in you might panic.
What do I give in return?
How do I earn this?
What if they see something and change their mind?
What if I start to believe in it—and then it’s taken away?
That’s the fear. Not just of love. But of loss.
You’re not resisting love, Layla. You’re resisting the heartbreak of trusting it. You’re resisting the weight of hope, because hope feels risky when disappointment has been a familiar guest.
But still—you’re here. Writing this. Naming it. That matters more than you think.
Because the truth is, learning how to let someone love you isn’t a performance. It’s not a grand reveal or a single leap. It’s a slow, cautious loosening. A gentle undoing of the old instructions.
It’s choosing to stay when you want to disappear.
It’s letting someone hold your gaze a moment longer.
It’s not interrupting the compliment with a deflection.
It’s noticing the urge to protect yourself—and softening just one inch.
You don’t have to trust love all at once. You don’t have to hand over your heart in one unguarded motion. You just have to stay in the room. Stay in your body. Let yourself be seen for a few more breaths than you did yesterday.
Because here’s something I know: the people who have the hardest time letting love in are usually the ones who would love the deepest if they ever felt safe enough.
And safety takes time.
Not just time to be built by another person—but time for your own system to believe it.
So be patient with yourself. Be kind. The part of you that flinches isn’t the enemy. It’s the version of you that survived what you’ve been through. The part of you that learned to self-protect in order to keep going.
Let her be there. Let her whisper her warnings. But don’t let her make every decision.
Love doesn’t need you to be fearless. It only asks that you stay open enough to let a new experience unfold.
Maybe love doesn’t arrive all at once. Maybe it drips in through the cracks. Maybe it enters your life through the quiet steadiness of someone who doesn’t leave when you get weird.
Maybe the most profound kind of love is the one that gives you room to figure out how to receive it.
And maybe—just maybe—you’re already beginning.
No pressure to rush. No need to be perfect. Just take your hands away from the door, and rest for a while.
You don’t have to earn it.
–RJ