Welcome to the crop top experience. My name is Carleighla (Car-LAY-la) Williams. I’ve wanted to create a blog for a very long time, but I was scared of how the blog would be received because, as we all know, sometimes social media can be a bit cruel, and I am a crybaby Cancer through and through. BUT I have decided to rip the band-aid off and do it anyway.

Growing up, my introduction to love and romance started at home with my parents. My mother was always very committed to the idea of being in love; my father, not so much. Watching this relationship imbalance, my mother unknowingly taught me to ask for little and accept even less emotionally from my romantic partner.

My favorite movies during my childhood were Love and Basketball and Love Jones. Each of those movies had a common thread of ride or die/ struggle love written all over it, but the girl always got the guy she wanted in the end.  These movies had me believing the pain of being in a not-so-healthy relationship was ok and once the couple got through the “rough patch,” they would reap the benefits of staying through the pain.

For those of you who don’t know what struggle love is, simply put, it’s the belief that for a couple to grow, one or both people must inflict and endure emotional and/or psychological and sometimes physical pain within the relationship.

Eventually, I started building a mental dating toolkit equipped with these ideas about love that I had seen around me. Each time I would meet a guy, I would reach into my toolbox and pull out things I thought would get me to my goal of being a girlfriend and eventually a wife, but each time I went into my box, I kept feeling like I was using the wrong tool. As a result, I was being ghosted, used, and sometimes emotionally abused. So now I am emptying my toolbox and adding tools along the way that feel good to me.

Check out my latest episode of The View From Here, where I chat with Samantha Polen about ways she ripped off her emotional band-aid and learned to love herself after heartbreak.