The year is already halfway gone, and I’ve been thinking a lot about my love life. There’s some of it I’d like to share. I have known great love and heartbreaking loss. I've learned a few things and there are many things I still don’t have words for. But this I’ve come to understand, some endings don’t happen when the love ends. They happen when clarity begins and no matter how deeply you feel for someone, love alone cannot carry a relationship.
Have you ever met someone who felt like magic? Like maybe, just maybe, they were the one who could finally meet you in all your bigness, your softness, your fire? For a moment, they did. Until they didn’t. You’ve been married before or you’ve been engagement and you thought you’re with your forever person until they aren’t…listen, you’re not alone in experiencing this tempest called life.
They say love is a risk and yes, it is. However too often we mistake our willingness to love as proof that we’re ready to be loved well in return. Sometimes we offer the purest parts of ourselves to people who simply don’t have the emotional tools to hold them. It is often times not because they’re cruel (not always). Sometimes they’re just under-equipped. If you’ve learned how to communicate, manage your emotions, and reflect on your actions but they haven’t, you’re not building a relationship you’re stuck in a cycle of fixing and explaining.
Staying true to yourself is a skill you’ll have to learn. How to stop the emotional labour of carrying the relationship alone and calling it love is a hack you’ll need to master.
You can’t build something stable with someone who disappears during hard conversations. You can’t be at peace with someone whose silence punishes your honesty. You can’t be safe with someone who does not choose all of you. You can’t heal when every disagreement leaves you wondering, “Will they shut down? Will they walk away again?”
So, ask yourself:
• Can they sit with discomfort or do they flee?
• Do they take responsibility or do they defend, deflect, disappear?
• Are they available emotionally or only when things feel good?
• Can they truly see you or do they only love the version of you that doesn’t challenge them?
These are not romantic questions. They’re grounding ones and we need to ask them early, not after we’ve handed over our trust.
Love isn’t just how someone makes you feel when things are sweet. It’s who they become when things get hard. Do they lean in or shut down? Do they soothe, or stonewall? Do they stay, or do they run? Do they remain accountable and vulnerable to the love you share?
Compatibility is a mutual commitment to repair when rupture happens because rupture will happen. No one is perfect but some people are trying. Others are just hoping you’ll keep forgiving what they never intend to fix.
To the ones who love deeply, don’t lose that. Your love is not a weakness. It’s not too much. Rather it is sacred. It’s rare. Continue to give it deliberately. Give it where it can be received, reciprocated, respected. Never where it’s romanticized then mishandled.
You deserve someone whose nervous system doesn’t see your truth as a threat. Someone who doesn’t make you pay for needing clarity. Someone whose apologies are not just in words but behaviour change.
When love and loving hurts (and it will) return to this poem by Nayyirah Waheed:
“stay soft. it looks beautiful on you.
some people will never see you.
keep shining anyway.
if someone does not want me
it is not the end of the world.
but if i do not want me
the world is nothing but endings.”
Let that settle in your spirit. You can want someone deeply and still choose to protect your peace. You can miss them and still walk away.
Love and loving is wild!
So, if you’re reading this with a heavy heart, maybe fresh from an ending, I hope you know your ability to love is not what failed. Your standards didn’t ruin anything. Your boundaries weren’t too harsh. Your emotions weren’t irrational.
You were simply asking for the bare minimum of emotional safety and that’s not too much. You were brave to love. You’ll be even braver to love again with wiser eyes, a steadier heart, and a stronger spine.
Choose with your whole self next time, not just your longing, not just your history and definitely not just the hope. Choose the one who chooses you, fully, freely, repeatedly. Until then, stay with yourself.
You are worth staying for.
Thanks for this piece, when one is self aware, one will know that love is not enough
Well Sadi