When you put others before yourself, you end up putting yourself last.
When you conform to what you think others want you to be, you lose who you really are.
When you only think about them, you forget about you.
Everyone wants to be the cool girlfriend. Chill girlfriend. The wifey type who is magically okay with just about everything. No one wants to be the controlling girlfriend. Crazy girlfriend. The jealous type who doesn’t let their boyfriend do anything.
Most of us can’t be the cool girlfriend forever. Most of us don’t have the level of undying trust and limitless self-confidence necessary to be the chill girlfriend. If you are this person, props to you. I aspire to become you someday. The grass seems much greener on your side.
The rest of us however, we’re just not that cool. We have insecurities. We have trust issues. Deeply rooted trust issues. We can pretend to be the cool girlfriend. We can pretend to be okay with everything our boyfriends do when we’re not around. We can pretend to not be jealous of their pretty friends. We can pretend we don’t cry ourselves to sleep because of all the things we aren’t okay with, but are too prideful in our “cool girlfriend” act to say anything about. We can pretend and act and laugh it off the next day like nothing happened. But we can only pretend for so long. And we can’t pretend forever.
Yes, when you put others before yourself, you end up putting yourself last. But it’s not entirely your fault. At the opposite side of the coin, these people are letting you put them first and they too are putting you last. That’s not being the cool girlfriend anymore. That’s being taken advantage of. That is your soul-crushing attempt at accepting him the way he is and giving him all the freedom in the world to do as his reckless heart desires, being taken advantage of.
At one end of the spectrum, no one likes the girlfriend that changes their man for the worse – stops him from seeing his friends, walks him around on a leash, and drapes herself over him so the world knows who he belongs to. But on the other end of the spectrum, it is absurd for him to not change at all when he gets a girlfriend. There are obvious things you can do when you’re single that you can’t do in a relationship. There are trade-offs and sacrifices you need to make if you want to call yourself her “boyfriend” and receive all the loyalty, companionship and love that comes along with it.
Your love isn’t free. Do not give it away like it is, without expecting any sort of reciprocation in return. Stop pretending to be the cool girlfriend. Be the girlfriend you really are. The one filled with flaws and insecurities and trust issues. The one that needs constant validation of how pretty you are. The one that needs your man to remind you every day that he’s loyal and thinking about you.
You deserve it. Otherwise, he does not deserve you.