Dear Someone: You’re not hard to love—you just learned love the hard way.

Read this if you’re learning how to love without ever being shown how + the 10 things my father never told me about relationships.

Dear, Dear Someone, _

I was seventeen when I thought I’d found my forever. She had a laugh that made me forget how lonely I was, and I clung to her like oxygen. I didn’t know then that love built on desperation rarely stands the test of time. I mistook intensity for intimacy, and in every argument, I stayed quiet because I thought peace meant silence. I thought apologizing first was always noble. I thought love required suffering.

I bled emotionally in that relationship—not because she was cruel, but because I didn’t know who I was or how to love without losing myself. I had no framework for how love should feel, how conflict should be handled, or how to hold boundaries without guilt. I kept asking myself, “Why does this feel so hard?” And the answer came to me one day when I looked in the mirror and saw the boy I had raised alone: because nobody taught me how.

I never had a father to warn me that love without self-worth is a dangerous gamble. That if you enter a relationship starved for validation, you’ll mistake breadcrumbs for banquets. I had no example of what it looked like when a man loved from a full cup—only what it looked like when a man was absent, and the silence did all the talking. I didn’t just long for love; I longed for a guide, someone to hand me a compass before I walked straight into emotional storms, thinking my ability to endure was the same as knowing how to navigate.

When you grow up fatherless, love becomes trial and error—and often, the errors shape you more than the love. I spent years collecting emotional bruises, not because I was reckless, but because I was unprepared. I had to learn alone what most boys get taught over Saturday mornings and drive-home talks. And somewhere between loving too hard and losing too much, I realized this: the lessons I needed most weren’t written in any book. They were the quiet truths a father might whisper to his son in the moments that matter most. These next ten are the ones I had to earn the hard way—because my father never told me… and I never knew him.