itspileofgoodthings:

and Ben does love Rey, he really does. that doesn’t make him a good person yet and it doesn’t mean it automatically will, but he does love her and that is so beautiful and hopeful because it proves that he is still human, that he is capable of tremendous change. I mean, he has already changed!

I think he loved her right from the start and tried to claim her as his- ignoring the droid that was far more pertinent to his mission, literally picking her up in his arms and carrying her through a battlefield instead of doing anything that made any more sense- but it was a possessive, dark, and one-sided claim, the closest he could come to love in his state but not something which fully deserved the word. When she defeats him at the end of The Force Awakens, she draws a hard and fast line between them- rejecting his possession and his clumsy demand that he be her teacher- as she should- and the reason I still ship it instead of being content with the shutdown as the appropriate move it was is because his reaction to it is not rage at her rejection, but awe of her strength. He sees what she can do, who she is at her very core, sees her light and her virtue even as it falls against him and- there is no bitterness, resentment, or answering wave of hatred. He falls harder, wants her more. And as he falls it changes him.

His demand to be her teacher becomes an offer of love the best he knows how to give it-an offer of power, still dark in many ways but more an offer of equality than dictatorial possession or hubris. The haunting loneliness that was inherent in him even under the rush and clumsiness of his you need a teacher expresses itself more truthfully in The Last Jedi as a desire for partnership. Rey, I want you to join me. His authoritative capture of her unconscious body is transformed into a scene that is almost a dance though it is still colored in violence, a dance where they fight with and for each other. He no longer merely wants her to be his- he wants her to be herself with him. His beseeching of Snoke that he be allowed to keep her- as his student, as his companion, as anything as long as she’s his- becomes the literal bisection of Snoke because the loyalty he once gave him dissolved in an instant when he sees how he treats Rey. Years of misplaced reverence and awe and the endless struggle to gain the approval of someone utterly unworthy of his devotion evaporated because if there is one truth he knows, it is that Rey is precious. The struggle for the light saber between them in the snow becomes the free gift of it as he gives her back her weapon, frees her from the prison of Snoke’s power, and asks her to stand with him as his partner and his equal, as someone he will protect and defend and love with everything in him.

Until. Until it reverts to a struggle for the lightsaber. Until he runs up against the fact that he has nothing to offer her but himself and, unable to see a way where that is enough, he cloaks his need in an offer of power. To rule, just the two of them, over everything. Until he runs up against the fact that he loves her and only her, that he has made no peace with anyone in the galaxy except her and until he runs up against the fact that isolation from the world cannot be the bedrock of a home and if he tried to make it one, only destruction would follow.

Rey loves him, too. I believe that. But she knows that what he asks will hurt not only the people she loves but them as well and so she rejects and runs because she has to. But she also doesn’t kill him, closes the door when she must, but waits and hopes for him because she wants to. And I don’t know how anyone could not want to see Ben go the final distance, change fully and finally, make it to the other side of his crimes and darkness and so into her heart, arms, and life. Because he’s come so far from where he once was and because that is where he belongs and because he knew that from the very beginning.

Kylo Ren loves Rey and thinks Ben Solo is a pathetic shadow who should be eliminated, but he can’t do so 

Rey loves Ben Solo, but she hates Kylo Ren. 

At this point, it would have been very bad for them to enter a relationship, but there is potential for things to turn around, and it’s likely they will.