Or why being loyal, sweet, and romantic won’t save you from heartbreak.

There’s a truth no one told us growing up.
Not your mom, not your best friend, not even the movies you binge-watched believing love always wins.
The truth is this:

Being the good girl won’t get you the love you dream of.

It won’t make him choose you.
It won’t make him treat you better.
It won’t guarantee safety, protection, or forever.

Let me tell you about Juan.

The First Love Lie

Juan was my first serious boyfriend.
He wasn’t my type at all, but he insisted. He courted me, chased me, sent flowers, flew to visit me. Eventually, I fell. I was in college, innocent, inexperienced, and he?
He was ten years older than me, charming, and adored by women everywhere. I thought he was the one.
He made grand gestures. Gave me gifts. Promised me forever.

At 20´s something, I truly believed I had found my forever person.
Spoiler: I hadn’t.

We spent years breaking up and getting back together in a toxic loop that left me anxious, insecure, and lost.

And then, a year and a half ago, Juan died in a motorcycle accident. I went to his funeral thinking I’d be the one great love of his life, just like he always told me, because after years of the “big break” we became friends.

But there were at least twenty “great loves” standing there.
All of us… thinking we were special.
All of us… lied to.

“Life doesn’t start with ‘I love you’, it starts with ‘It’s over’ and everything that comes after.”

What I wish someone had told me back then:

I wish someone older, someone a little worn out by life but still sharp, had sat me down back then—not to sugarcoat anything, not to offer spiritual lessons or romanticized crap about “timing”—but to tell me, calmly and clearly, that when you give everything to a man who hasn’t even earned your trust, let alone your heart, he won’t suddenly turn into the kind of man who deserves it. He won’t magically realize your worth. He’ll just get used to the free buffet.

And if you’re too sweet, too patient, too understanding, too damn available? You don’t inspire loyalty. You just train someone to expect everything without effort.

I thought Juan loved me. What he actually gave me was a masterclass in how not to confuse obsession with commitment. He sold me a story—one I was far too willing to believe—and underneath the big gestures and the dramatic promises, there was nothing solid. What I got in return for years of devotion was a nervous system wrecked by anxiety, abandonment wounds I had no name for at the time, and trauma disguised as “passion.” He didn’t break my heart once; he broke it in cycles, over and over again, until I was the one apologizing for bleeding.

It took me years of therapy—and not the cheap kind—to realize that I wasn’t broken. That the problem wasn’t that I was too much or not enough. The problem was that I kept choosing men who couldn’t even meet me halfway, and Juan was exhibit A. He was charming, yes, and generous when it suited him, but deeply unstable. He had so many unresolved issues—emotional immaturity, fear of real intimacy, maybe even confusion about his own sexual identity—that no amount of love from me was ever going to fix. I tried to love him into becoming someone he simply wasn’t ready to be. It was doomed from the start, and I stayed anyway, because that’s what “good” girls do—we stay and try harder.

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And then came Carlos.

Carlos was everything Juan wasn’t.
Stable. Present. Kind. Emotionally safe. The kind of man who replies to texts without power games, shows up without drama, and actually listens when you speak—not just to charm you, but to understand. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t disappear for days, didn’t create chaos just to make the calm feel like a reward.

And what did I do? I got bored.

Not because Carlos was boring, but because my nervous system didn’t know what to do with peace. After years of surviving off cortisol and adrenaline, of chasing validation and bracing for the next emotional hit, I had come to associate “love” with anxiety. I’d been conditioned to feel alive only when I was being pulled apart and stitched back together—usually by the same hands.

So when someone came along and simply… loved me? It felt empty. Like something was missing. Like I was missing. I didn’t recognize myself outside of chaos.

And here’s the tragic part: Carlos wasn’t the problem.
The problem was me not being able to metabolize stability without confusing it for indifference. He gave me everything I thought I wanted, but I couldn’t receive it, because deep down I was still calibrated to a different kind of love—the kind that burns you, then tells you the burn means it’s real.

So I let Carlos go. Quietly. Politely. With some excuse about needing time and space. And later, I cried. Not because I’d lost him, but because I’d realized how deeply I’d been trained to crave pain dressed as passion.

With time, I stopped assuming that everyone else had it figured out. I started listening more carefully, asking different questions, watching what wasn’t being said. Because something didn’t add up. I kept seeing couples who, on the surface, looked perfect—traveling together, raising kids, celebrating anniversaries, posting curated snapshots of domestic bliss. And yet, behind the scenes, the story was rarely as polished.

Some of them sleep in separate rooms. Others sleep in the same bed, share meals, exchange good morning texts, and even have sex regularly—while one of them has been carrying on an affair for months, sometimes years. And not just physical affairs, but emotional ones: secret messages, backup plans, lives being lived in parallel without the other even knowing. Some of these people send heart emojis to their partners by habit, while telling someone else that they feel more alive when they’re away from home.

There are couples who build homes, raise children, and file taxes together, all while pretending they don’t see the cracks widening beneath their feet. They’re not in love—they’re in routine, or in debt, or in denial. But they perform love well enough to fool the world, sometimes even themselves. And those are the relationships we’re told to envy. Those are the people society holds up as “success stories.”

So if you’re reading this from your own quiet apartment, wondering if being alone means you’re somehow behind, let me tell you something clearly: being single is not a failure. It doesn’t mean you’re broken or unlovable or doing life wrong. In fact, being alone can often mean you’re the only one not lying to yourself. There is a kind of dignity in choosing solitude over betrayal, in choosing your own company over a partnership built on pretense.

Over the years, I’ve had to unlearn almost everything I was taught about love. I had to dismantle the fantasy that if you’re kind enough, loyal enough, patient enough, someone will stay and choose you. That if you just love someone hard enough, they’ll magically become the person you need them to be. That being “the good girl” is some sort of guarantee against pain.

It’s not.

In fact, being the good girl often just makes you easier to lie to, easier to take for granted, easier to discard once the excitement wears off. It’s not your goodness that protects you—it’s your boundaries. It’s your ability to walk away when your needs aren’t being met. It’s knowing that love without respect, without honesty, without reciprocity, is not love at all. It’s just emotional labor unpaid.

At some point, you have to stop auditioning for roles you never wanted to play in the first place. You have to stop trying to be the exception, the one who “inspires” him to change. You have to stop offering the best parts of yourself to people who only show up when it’s convenient for them.

Because the real turning point isn’t when someone else finally chooses you.

It’s when you choose yourself—with both feet planted, no conditions, no more crumbs disguised as intimacy, no more waiting for texts that never come or explanations that never arrive.

And no, this isn’t a fairytale ending. There’s no cinematic kiss, no last-minute apology at the airport, no ring in a champagne glass. This ending is quieter, but far more powerful. It’s the one where the woman finally walks away—not because she stopped loving him, but because she finally started loving herself more.

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So no, there’s no perfect ending here. No magical fix. Just a woman who finally understands that real love starts when the illusions end. A woman who no longer confuses being chosen with being cherished. A woman who sees clearly now that staying, sometimes, means signing up to live in denial—and leaving means accepting that no one is coming to save her.

And with that clarity, I raise a quiet, bittersweet toast.

To the young woman I once was—full of delusion and fantasy,
who truly believed that love, on its own, was enough.
Who thought that if she just waited long enough, gave enough, forgave enough,
she’d be rewarded with the happy ending she was promised.

She didn’t get the fairytale.
But she got the truth.

And in the end, that was her freedom.

She is flowing.