Because My Mother Didn’t Love Me, I Searched for Love Everywhere

Let’s not pretend I started with sex. I started with the absence of touch. The absence of wanting to be touched. My mother didn’t love me — or she did, but only in the ways she thought counted: clean clothes, clean floors, clean lies. But I never learned to associate cleanliness with love. I learned to seduce love out of people. I learned to earn it. I learned to ache for it.

So I mastered ache. I made it my first language. Before I named it, I felt it crawling under my skin, a hunger with no mouth.

She rarely let me stay close. She seized every chance to send me away. I tried everything to impress her — to prove myself worthy of her love, if she had any to give. I craved love with a kind of hunger that embarrassed me. But how do I find something I don’t even recognize? I searched blind. And honestly? I gave up.

I grew up in a house where silence ruled and performance passed for connection. I smiled for visitors, straightened my spine for teachers, and served up decency like dessert. But behind closed doors, I starved. She treated me like a project. Not a person. She didn’t hold me. She managed me. And you know what happens to girls who get managed but not mothered? We get messy. We get mythic.

I studied love the way other girls studied for their SATs. I obsessed. I strategized. I went feral. I memorized boys. I wrote dissertations in bed. I underlined their moans. I annotated their absences. I took notes in every kiss: does he press the small of my back? Does he whisper or devour? Is this tenderness or tactics?

I didn’t date. I collected data. Every orgasm tested me. Every heartbreak humiliated me. I believed if I perfected being loved, someone would give it to me retroactively — a love so massive it could time-travel back and rescue the little girl who stared at her mother and asked: do I make you feel anything?

I didn’t realize how much I wanted a mother until someone touched me like they knew where the wound was. I mistook that for salvation.

I used to fantasize about becoming the kind of woman men don’t just want to fuck — they want to fold into. Not because I needed them. Because I wanted to be mirrored. I wanted someone to see me in the soft, godless way you see a child who’s never been punished for existing.

So I chased it. I chased it in text messages. In men who wore grief like trophies. In friendships that felt like courtships and courtships that felt like games. In therapists I wanted to mother me. In strangers I tried to impress with my self-awareness. I played the muse. The fantasy. The clever, undone girl who broke hearts with her mouth and healed them with her thighs.

But here’s the problem: I got so good at giving love, I stopped noticing when no one gave it back.

The mother wound doesn’t just bleed. It teaches. It teaches me to earn what should have been mine. It teaches me to normalize starvation. Worse, it teaches me to eroticize it. To mistake absence for intimacy. To find comfort in longing because at least it’s familiar.

After my last situationship last year, it hit me — not like a thought, but like a car crash in slow motion. I don’t know what real love feels like. But I know how to act like I do. And isn’t that almost the same thing? Isn’t it? That terrifies me — how fluent I’ve become in the simulation. How well I perform closeness, intimacy, affection, without ever actually feeling safe.

That night I didn’t even cry. I went still. Curled in my bed like a comma, a pause in my own sentence. I stared at the ceiling like it owed me answers. And I thought: is this it? Is this the climax? A lifetime of craving wrapped in decorative sadness?

What if no one ever holds me like a person, only studies me like a performance? What if I trained myself out of being loved in any way that isn’t conditional? Do I even know how to love without auditioning for it?

People talk about daddy issues, but mommy issues destroy you with elegance. They don’t make you reckless. They make you precise. I perform security. I perfect monologues that sound like boundaries. I play the role of the woman who figured it out. Who’s healing. Who eats prayers for breakfast.

But underneath? I’m still that girl. Not broken. Just unbelieved. And I want to be touched so specifically it borders on ritual. I want someone to look at me like a revelation. I want someone to notice how well I hide how much I want to be noticed.

So yes. I searched for love everywhere. I wore it. I flirted with it. I knelt before it. I told myself if I studied enough bodies, I’d become fluent in being wanted. But what I really wanted was something simpler. I wanted to feel safe.

Not admired. Not worshipped. Not fucked. Just held. And I wanted it to feel like a sentence that never ends. Like a language my body finally understands.