The love I know is liberating. My love for you is a struggle.
It is a struggle in a way we hide from the accusations people throw at us. A struggle in a way that only we know and only we understand—known yet hidden. A struggle in a way that exists unseen by your mother and mine, by my father and yours, by our older siblings, and even by our relatives.
Yet love, for us, does not imprison. It does not silence voices. It does not blind eyes to the truth. It does not strip away rights. It does not trample on one's humanity. It does not deceive nor does it abuse.
We hide it so well that no one knows there is an “us”, that there is something between us. For so long, we have learned to act ordinary whenever we are together, afraid of what people might say if they knew. Somewhere along the way, we failed to notice that we had already fallen in love—even when it was forbidden, even when it was not allowed, even when it seemed impossible. And so we chose not to continue, believing that no matter how hard we tried, we could never force the world to give us what we wanted.
Some are forced to hide their relationships behind closed doors. Some had to learn how to speak about the people they love in careful language. Some spend years choosing between honesty and belonging, between being loved for who they are and being accepted by the people they cannot bear to lose.
To love you is a struggle, but not because of you. Not because our love is not enough, flawed, or wrong. The struggle begins where love meets misunderstanding. It exists in places where acceptance is denied, where love is questioned rather than appreciated, and where people mistake our love for something that should not exist.
That is the price of loving in a world that does not always make room for love. Every choice leaves something behind; every act of courage asks us to surrender a former self.
To love you is to attend a thousand funerals of who we used to be. Love is not one story—it is a thousand small farewells to old versions of ourselves. It is to understand and be understood, to choose and be chosen, to love and be loved.
Love is meant to be liberating, and yet loving you has become a struggle.
And perhaps that is the truth I have been trying to understand all along. It was never that I struggled to love you—it was that I learned to love you in a world that kept telling me I shouldn’t, until even my love began to feel like something I must survive in.
