Lover girl

I think what we avoidant, tough, non-lover girls believe is that we would never be like “other girls.” We think we would never be weak for a man or fall to our knees for one. We tell ourselves that men can’t hold onto us or manipulate us the way they do lover girls.

So when we finally reach that point, when we realize that, at the end of the day, we are just girls, something inside us shatters.

We think:

He did it.

He broke down my barriers.

He got me to soften for him.

He treated me like every other girl.

He manipulated me.

I got blinded by love.

We never thought it could happen to us. And now that it has, we can’t believe it. We don’t even understand how we got here.

Me?

Never a lover girl.

Weak for a man?

To the point where everyone is calling me a Yam Head?

How did I get here?

Everyone around me keeps telling me that I’ve changed, that I’ve become this delusional lover girl now. People ask, “What happened to the tough Junnie? The Junnie who never believed in falling weak for a man?”

They couldn’t understand why I stayed in a situation I swore I would never be in, why I defended him, how I became powerless and voiceless.

Hearing my loved ones say that about me, even having a mini intervention forced me to sit with the question I’d been avoiding:

How did I get here?

Did he manipulate me, or did I hide behind a tough exterior as an avoidant, non-lover girl to protect myself from the inevitable, being weakened by love?

Maybe the lover girl was already inside of me, and he was the one who awakened her.