LOVE WINS ERA · THINK ABOUT THIS

My Peace of Mind

Mon, 10 Aug 2026

There is a certain instability in being in a relationship you are not allowed to have any claim to. Not ownership of another person. Ownership of your place in their life. When feelings and attachments begin to form, denying them does not make them disappear. Being afraid to name them does not make them less real. It only creates a relationship in which both people are experiencing something they are unwilling, or unable, to acknowledge. I would rather be honest about what I feel than lie about its existence just to make the situation easier to maintain. There is a particular kind of pain in being wanted, but not wanted enough to be claimed. In being pulled close and then reminded not to get too comfortable. In receiving affection without being given the security to trust it. To be wanted and not wanted is a wound that never gets to heal. Because every time you begin to settle into the warmth of being loved, the uncertainty returns and reminds you that you may not actually have a place there. Someone who is secure in their position in another person's life gets to relax. They get to stop interpreting every silence. Stop measuring every change in tone. Stop wondering whether closeness has become too close. Stop preparing themselves to be reminded that they misunderstood what this was. Security does not mean possession. It means being allowed to believe the love you are receiving without constantly being warned not to depend on it. The back and forth is destabilizing. It seems that every time I finally stop grieving the life I wanted with him, he comes back. And he knows. He knows how I feel about him. He knows what his presence means to me. He knows that whatever exists between us is not casual simply because we refuse to give it a name. Maybe that is because he is vulnerable to it too. There is a part of him that seems unable to deny how much he wants the kind of love I have for him. For a little while, he lets himself have it. And I let myself believe in it again. Then something changes. Fear. Panic. Reality. Whatever name belongs to the thing that happens inside him, I cannot know. I only know what happens next. He becomes a ghost. And I am left standing in the sudden absence of something that, moments before, felt completely real. That is the part that devastates me. It isn't simply that he leaves. It is that every return asks me to reopen something I have been trying to heal. Every return interrupts the grieving. Every return gives shape again to the life I have been teaching myself to live without. And then it disappears. Again. There is no clean loss to mourn because the thing I am mourning keeps coming back to life. So I begin grieving him. I begin accepting. I begin letting go. And just when the emptiness starts becoming ordinary instead of unbearable, there he is. For a little while, there is love where the emptiness was. Then fear turns him back into a ghost, and I am left with nothing but the terrible awareness of the space where love had just been. The last time, I left town for a few months. I didn't reach out. I didn't look for him on social media. I didn't search for some small indication that he missed me. I didn't manufacture reasons to remain connected. I just did my best to clean up the mess his absence had left behind. And eventually, I did. Or I was beginning to. That is what makes the return so difficult to understand. Life does not stop becoming complicated simply because your heart is broken. There are still bills to pay. Places to be. Responsibilities waiting in the morning. People who need things from you. Decisions that cannot be postponed because you are grieving someone who is still very much alive. Those are the moments when having a partner can make an enormous difference. Not someone to rescue you. Just someone whose arms you are allowed to fall into when the rest of life becomes too heavy. Someone who says, I've got you. You don't have to carry all of this alone tonight. I know what that kind of love feels like because I know how to give it. And somehow, with him, I am continually brought close enough to believe I might finally be allowed to receive it, only to discover that I am still expected to carry everything alone. I wonder sometimes whether he understands that heartbreak is not merely sadness. It can hurt physically. It can hollow out your appetite and your concentration. It can make ordinary responsibilities feel impossibly heavy. It can leave you staring at everything you are supposed to care about while trying to remember why any of it matters. There have been moments when continuing with ordinary life has required more strength than anyone looking at me would have known. And perhaps that is what I wish he understood. Every time he disappears, he gets to leave the relationship. I am the one who has to survive its ending. Then, eventually, I begin building a life around the absence. I remember how to carry my own weight. I stop waiting. I stop grieving the future I wanted. I learn how to live without him. And then he comes back. That is why the back and forth is not romantic to me anymore. It is destabilizing. Because I know now that I can survive losing him. What I don't know is how many times I should have to. I have accepted that he will never choose me. Maybe some part of him wants to. But he won't. There is a difference between wanting something and being willing to build a life capable of holding it. I cannot keep confusing the two. I don't fantasize about us being in a relationship anymore. Definitely not a situationship. I don't want half a relationship carefully constructed so neither person ever has to admit that the other matters. I don't want intimacy without responsibility, affection without accountability, or love that must constantly pretend it isn't love. I want all of it. And all of it is a lot. It requires honesty. Communication. Accountability. Growth. It requires showing up when showing up is inconvenient. It means having someone to catch you when life starts throwing punches instead of discovering, once again, that you are standing there alone. I want someone to have experiences with. Someone to adventure with. Someone whose hand I can reach for without first wondering whether I am allowed. Someone I can care for out loud. I don't think everyone wants the responsibility that comes with being loved that way. I do. And my heart knows exactly what it wants. When I came back this time, he asked me if I had come back to get him. I told him I didn't know that was an option. Because it never had been before. I had spent months teaching myself that it never would be. I had stopped reaching out. Stopped looking. Stopped imagining some different ending. I had done the ugly work of accepting the life I wanted with him was a life I wasn't going to have. So when he stood in the doorway, I knew. Immediately. And I cried. Not because I suddenly believed he would choose me. Not because I thought this time would be different. I cried because I knew I would let him in anyway. I knew what his presence would wake back up in me. I knew how easily my body would remember what my mind had worked so hard to accept. I knew how good it would feel to have him there. And I knew how much it would hurt when he was gone. There was no fantasy left to protect me. No misunderstanding. No naïve belief that if I loved him well enough, eventually he would stay. I knew exactly who he was. I knew exactly what this was. I knew exactly how it would end. And I opened the door anyway. I asked him if he had a head injury. He must have bumped his head somewhere, because suddenly he was saying things that had my heart hurdling boundaries I had spent months building. He talked about his loyalty to me. He hinted, again, at something unwavering in the way he loves. He talked about what it means to do your best. That your best is variable. That some days it looks different than others. That there is no such thing as giving more than one hundred percent. You give what you actually have. And God, it sounded like almost. Again. That dangerous little space between never and maybe. I believed him. That may be the hardest part to explain. I don't think he was lying. I believe he meant the things he said when he said them. And I am crying again because I cannot afford to hope they are true for me. Hope has become expensive. I told him plainly that if we were only going through the motions with each other while ultimately holding some part of ourselves back for somebody else, we needed to stop. Now. Before somebody got hurt. He knew exactly what I meant. And for a moment, he looked like he might actually be ready. Not someday. Not almost. Ready. I felt myself begin to believe it. And then I felt the exact moment fear entered the room.despite. I know that shift now. I know what comes after it. The distance. The silence. The unanswered question. This time, I had asked about the status of something we had agreed upon. When he finally responded, he acknowledged that he knew his silence had triggered my anxiety. He understood that the anxiety became fear and that, combined with everything else I was already trying to hold together, fear became panic. That mattered. But understanding the wound after inflicting it is not the same as learning not to keep touching it. And then there was the other thing. When someone had wronged me, he offered to handle it. He understood there could be danger involved. I told him no. I told him not to go near it. Because my greatest fear was not losing my possessions. It was losing him. I told him I would rather be stripped of everything I owned than have him risk his life over something that could be replaced. I had never seen that willingness in him before. That instinct to defend me. To avenge me. To go to war because someone had hurt me. And all I could think was: Please don't start a war for someone you won't choose. Don't risk your life defending my place in this world when you still cannot decide what my place is in yours. Because I don't need someone willing to destroy something for me. I need someone willing to build something with me. I don't need vengeance. I need consistency. I don't need you to fight the person who hurt me. I need to know that when life hurts me, you won't disappear too. There seemed something unbearably tragic about his willingness to fight over what had been done to me when he still could not find the same willingness to fight through his own fear to keep me in his life. Maybe one kind of fight is easier. A threat gives you an enemy. Love gives you yourself. There is nobody else to defeat. No wrong to avenge. No battle to win. There is only the terrifyingly ordinary work of staying. And that is the fight I have always needed him to choose. I can't keep waiting for him to make up his mind. There has to come a point when his inability to choose becomes a choice of its own. I cannot continue living half alive, sustained by things that sound like promises but disappear the moment I try to put any weight on them. And this isn't because I want to replace him. I don't. I don't believe people are replaceable. I am not searching crowds for another version of him. I am not interviewing candidates for the vacancy he left behind. I don't want somebody else simply because I cannot have him. For the last few months, I have declined every offer. I jokingly call it my hiatus. I tell them I'd prefer they discover they dislike me before I have sex with them. It tends to clear the room. Because eventually they realize I'm serious. I'm not playing hard to get. I'm not waiting to be persuaded. My body is not something someone gets access to because they find me attractive. Sex is not the audition through which someone discovers whether I am worth knowing. If you want my body, you are going to encounter the inconvenient fact that I live inside it. And I am a lot. I love deeply. I ask questions. I communicate. I expect honesty. I notice inconsistencies. I believe apologies should become changed behavior. I expect accountability from myself and from the people I allow close to me. I want adventure and tenderness and ridiculous stories and someone beside me when life becomes ugly. I want someone I can care for out loud. Someone who can care for me out loud too. That kind of intimacy carries responsibility. Most people seem to want the benefits without the weight. I don't. It is all or nothing for me. And I am prepared for nothing. That is the part I need him to understand. Nothing is not a threat. It is not punishment. It is not an ultimatum designed to finally make him choose me. I have accepted that he won't. Maybe he loves me. Maybe some part of him desperately wants this. Maybe everything he told me was true. I can believe all of those things and still leave. Because love being real does not automatically make a relationship possible. And I cannot keep allowing the possibility of him to prevent me from fully inhabiting my own life. I cannot keep waiting for almost. I cannot keep rebuilding myself after every disappearance. I cannot keep teaching my heart to survive without him only to hand it back the moment he appears in my doorway. I know what happens next. That knowledge has to mean something. So this time, if nothing is what remains when I refuse to accept half of something, then I will take nothing. I will grieve it. I will hate it. There will be mornings when I would give anything to hear his voice and nights when every part of me will argue that almost was better than empty. But I know better now. Almost is not the opposite of nothing. Sometimes almost is how you lose everything slowly. I don't need him to stop loving me. I don't need to stop loving him. I need to stop building my life around the possibility that one day he might become able to choose what he already knows he wants. He gets to decide what he is capable of. And I finally get to decide what I am willing to live with or without