I Was Made For So Much More Than To Just Love You
You can marry the love of your life and still not be happy with yourself.
Alex Gukalov / shutterstock By Allie Braun
Ed Sheeran and Tori Kelly sing the lyrics, “I don’t know what we should do, darling I was made for loving you.”
I love both of them as artists. They are both amazing people and both have more musical talent in their left toe than I do in my whole being, but their lyrics in this song are so off.
They are sweet, of course, and it’s a nice thought that there is someone out there made perfectly for loving us, but it just makes them seem very flat as people.
They basically are saying that there is someone out there that is only alive because they are to love someone else. They aren’t alive to become a doctor, or a lawyer or save starving children or cure cancer. Nope, they were made for loving one person.
And that whole idea is just so far off from what I have believed my whole life that it just doesn’t make any form of sense to me.
So I need to be clear about this one thing: I was not made for loving you.
My hand was not formed to fit perfectly inside of yours. My mouth was not created with the intent to match yours like puzzle pieces when we kiss. My body was not designed to lie next to yours at night and fill in the gaps that yours leaves in between us.
I just wasn’t designed that way. I was made for more.
I was made for a keyboard and trackpad. Made to type and click and when I am done I will have created something new. Something that hadn’t existed before I started out to do what I was made to do.
I need these things. I create every day, much more than just myself.
I was made to be there for my friends, say what people needed to hear, to say what they couldn’t or to be silent when they needed to use their own words.
I was created to smile and frown and take goofy Polaroid pictures at midnight. I was made to feel the ocean and sand and sun. I was made to run and to love and hate all at the same time.
I wasn’t made for loving you. I was made for much greater things.
I am not designed to simply go to college and fall in love with the first boy who calls me beautiful. I was made not with the sole purpose of finding a soulmate and getting married to them. And I don’t think anyone else was either.
I think sometimes we think that’s all we can do with our lives. I think people see others walking around happy and getting married and think all they have to do is do that and life will be grand. But that’s not true.
You can marry the love of your life and still not be happy with yourself.
You can run away with your soulmate and still not be happy with your past. You can even decide that the person sitting next to you while you read this is the only person you want to spend your life with but still not be happy with your job.
You are always going to want more because even though the idea of only needing one person to be happy forever is amazing and romantic, it's not all that there is. Some of it is, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not all of it is all I’m saying.
Everyone deserves to have love and be loved, but contrary to our fairy tales, that’s not the only thing or even the most important thing we do with our lives.
So, no, I was not made for loving you and you weren’t made for loving me, but that’s the whole reason we will end up falling in love you see.
Because I will fall in love with the things that you love, the things that you were made for, your passions and goals. And you will fall in love with what I was made for because I love it and you love me.
Allie Braun is a writer attending Furman University pursuing a degree in Sustainability Science. Her work focuses primarily on relationships, current events, and lifestyle topics.