#PrescriptionPost Dear Artidote, How do you know if you love someone out of loneliness? Is it love o

#PrescriptionPost

Dear Artidote,
How do you know if you love someone out of loneliness? Is it love or just filling the void?

“Dear Gentle Soul,

The heart is such a hopeful thing. It is always looking for a place to grow roots in. It feels that the best place for these roots is with another heart, love being the soil in which they grow. However, even the truest loves can fall apart and the garden where love once lived withers. Yet, after experiencing the intensity of love once, the heart yearns for the happiness it once had, and searches desperately for the soil it had grown such beautiful flowers in.

Loneliness is a kind of soil too. In it flowers do grow. But they are weaker than the kind that grow with love. They crumble easily, and no amount of nurturing is going to help them grow stronger.

So how does one distinguish between them?

By asking yourself: If you lost them, would you miss the love they are filling in your heart or would you miss them for the person they are aside from the love they give you and how you have both grown stronger since knowing each other?

If you miss them because you will miss their love, then you are loving to fill a void, and neither of you can truly grow this way. If you miss them for who they are and for all the ways you have grown together as people, then you have found love and the roots in your hearts are stronger together than you can even imagine. Now, imagine the kind of flowers you will grow once you know this for sure.” —The Artidote (Nikita Gill)

artwork by Gürbüz Doğan Ekşioğlu