BTWN LVRS

On understanding everyone, overlooking myself, and learning that love requires more than a generous heart.

Let me begin with a confession that is only embarrassing because I spent so many years believing the opposite:

I loved love, but I was not always very good at it.

I was good at caring.

Good at listening.

Excellent at understanding why someone behaved the way they did.

Give me a difficult childhood, an emotionally distant parent, one devastating heartbreak, and a man who was “trying in his own way,” and I could build a compassionate explanation before the appetizers arrived.

You may know this kind of loving.

It looks patient from the outside. Mature, even. You tell yourself you are offering grace. You understand that people have histories. You know trauma does not disappear simply because someone enters a relationship and promises to do better.

All of that is true.

It is also true that understanding someone can become a very elegant way of avoiding what their behavior is doing to you.

That was the part I missed.

I thought love meant making room for the whole person. Their tenderness. Their fear. Their wounds. Their unfinished work.

Apparently, I believed this room did not also need to contain me.

Maybe you have done this too.

Maybe you became so fluent in someone else’s pain that you stopped speaking your own language. Maybe you kept translating their silence, defensiveness, distance, anger, or inconsistency into something more compassionate than what it felt like to live beside it.

He is afraid.

She has been through a lot.

They do not know how to communicate.

This is just how he protects himself.

She did not mean it that way.

And perhaps all of those explanations were correct.

But explanations do not make a relationship safe. Compassion does not automatically make it mutual. Knowing why someone hurts you does not require you to volunteer for the next occurrence.

That is where this column begins.

Not with the idea that one gender is the problem, that everybody’s ex is a narcissist, or that relationships can be repaired with three communication tips and a shared calendar.

We are going to talk about what people actually bring into the room when they try to love one another: hope, attraction, family history, ego, longing, fear, survival skills, good intentions, questionable decisions, and at least one belief they have never examined because it has been working against everyone quietly.

Including themselves.

I will tell you stories from my lens. Some will belong closely to my life. Others will be inspired by the patterns I have witnessed, studied, survived, laughed at, and eventually learned to name.

The details may change.

The humans will remain recognizable.

Because most of us are not failing at love because we are heartless. We are failing because we learned pieces of it without learning the whole thing.

We learned loyalty without boundaries.

Commitment without communication.

Chemistry without compatibility.

Forgiveness without repair.

Providing without partnering.

Being needed without being known.

And some of us learned how to understand everyone in the room except ourselves.

So pour the coffee. Steep the tea. Grab the blanket if the weather permits, or if you simply enjoy dramatic reading conditions.

We have some things to talk about.

And since you have already heard the advice, let me tell you a story.