I think if you truely love the game you are in for a ride. I love the game, had some good nights winning and bad nights losing - but the next day always still a love for the game.
Reinforcing what everyone else has said, read up all you can to give you a deeper understanding of the game. Some of the simplest math i could recommend for you is for calculating your outs using "rule of 4 and 2" - this meaning if you have AK and you missed the flop and have no draws - then you have 6 outs, 3 kings and 3 aces...so 6x4 is 24. Now you know if you suspect you are behind, you are going to hit one of your 6 outs about 24% (almost 1 in 4) of the time on the turn. If you are past the flop to the turn and looking to river your outs the percentages becomes cut in half - 6x2 for 12% chance to hit. This is where flush draw
odds come from, 9 outs give you about a 36% chance (little more than 1 in 3) of catching your flush on the turn. This simple rule helped me make decisions during a game and develop a better game plan over time.
For me i started off playing small $10 and $20 buy in home game tournanents. Sometimes 10 player sng's sometimes 20 player games. Either way, with a tournament you are not going to lose anything more than your initial buy in. If you start playing $1/$2 cash with $600 in your pocket and you run bad, or just start tilting you can lose it all before you know it. Ive blown my online roll multiple times from tilting and i always know its the wrong thing to do. Its a bad feeling the next day to know how bad yiu screwed up.
Anyhow, if tournament play is just not something you want to do I would recommend for cash stakes you start at no higher than .05 / .10 until you get comfortable playing the game. You can make $20+ in a session where you arnt risking much more than $10 or $20 - because at "micro stakes" - most players just simply cant fold for less than a dollar.
Lastly, if you do start playing cash games at higher (than micro) stakes - the best advice i can offer is to seperate in your mind the value of what you are betting, and just think of it as chips you are playing with - ie: dont play with scared money. Dont think about "well i gotta call $25 to see the turn" - if your hand has some good
equity, just play your hand the way you should. I struggled with this when i started playing cash games in my local
casinos and my game dramatically improved when i stopped playing with scared money.