I’ve had an influx of text messages this week from friends searching for relationship advice and if not advice than just a friend who will take their worries seriously. I consider myself far from an expert on anything so I assume that my tendency to actually listen and provide thoughtful comments on the love lives of my friends, has made me out to be someone more knowledgeable than I actually am.

That said,  I do enjoy being this person for my friends. When it comes to matters of the heart, it seems that there is few people they can trust. We live in a society that embraces cold personalities and even finds great humor in being a person who “has no feelings.” So it only makes sense that these warm, feeling people that I call my friends are searching for a safe space to talk about “the feels”.

What I found after a couple of conversations, text message sessions, and Facebook chats (I have friends all over the world, which I think is just the coolest) is that the majority of them are dealing with the notion that they are worthy of being loved the way they want to be loved. I know what this is like because I had to come to terms with this very same notion this year after ending a very long term, grown-into-each-other, relationship.

There is nothing wrong with having standards for how you want to be loved. Sometimes we’re afraid to let someone go because we’re worried we’ll never find someone better for us; we think that we want too much and so we stifle the parts of us that want to love deeply or differently. We try to adjust how we love to match the way someone else loves. This only causes us, and them, pain.

The hardest part of this is realizing that something horrible doesn’t have to happen for a relationship to end. Sometimes two really fantastic, wonderful people become not so wonderful and fantastic when mixed together. There’s a reason so many people refer to chemistry when they talk about romance.

Love should be about bettering each other and letting the other person grow. It is not about stifling each other because you are afraid to otherwise grow. Sometimes things need to end simply because you no longer fit, and that’s okay.

Sometimes we have to let go and trust that there is something better for us on the other end. Sometimes we have to be really afraid. And just know that if you’re afraid right now me and everyone else who loves your sensitive little self are just a text message, subway ride, or flight, away.