By Anonymous
I love him. I also know that love is not always enough. I am sitting with both of those things and I am so tired.
Sunday. After a long phone call I should not have stayed on. Nobody warns you about this kind of love. They warn you about the ones who are cruel, the ones who lie, the ones who leave without explanation. There are whole songs, whole therapy modalities, whole genres of self-help built around those. But nobody really prepares you for the particular exhaustion of loving someone who is simply at war with themselves. Someone who is not bad. Someone who is, in many ways, extraordinary. Someone who just cannot seem to believe it.
I have been in this for long enough that I know his wounds better than he does. I can feel when one has been touched before he says a word. I know which silences mean he is retreating and which mean he is just tired. I know the specific way his voice goes flat when he has decided, quietly, that he does not deserve whatever good thing is in front of him. I have learned him the way you learn a language you were never formally taught, by immersion, by paying close attention, by making mistakes and adjusting.
What I did not expect is how lonely that knowledge would make me.
Because knowing someone deeply and being truly met by them are two different things. I can see him clearly. I am not sure he can see himself at all, and when you cannot see yourself, you cannot fully see the person standing in front of you either. What you see instead is a reflection of your own worst fears. You see someone who will eventually realise you are not worth it. Someone who is only here out of pity or obligation or some mistake they have not yet corrected. You test that theory, sometimes gently and sometimes not, and the person who loves you spends so much energy failing the test and then proving themselves again that they forget, for stretches of time, who they actually are.
I have forgotten, for stretches of time, who I actually am.
That is the confession underneath the confession. It is not just that I am tired of carrying his self-doubt alongside my own life. It is that somewhere in the carrying, I started to absorb it.
I asked a friend about this once, carefully, without using his name or mine. She said something I have been turning over ever since. She said: you cannot pour into a person who has no bottom. Not because they are broken beyond repair, but because the work of building that bottom is theirs to do. You can hand them materials. You can sit beside them while they do it. But you cannot do it for them, and if you try, you will pour and pour and pour and one day look up and find yourself empty in a way that has nothing to do with how much you love them.
I know she is right. I have known for a while. The knowing and the leaving are very different distances apart.
Because here is what I cannot resolve: he is trying. Genuinely, visibly, imperfectly trying. He goes to the hard conversations now instead of away from them. He catches himself sometimes mid-spiral and says, out loud, I know this is not rational. He told me last month that I have made him want to be kinder to himself, and the way he said it, like it was a strange new country he was not sure he had permission to enter, broke something open in me. How do you leave someone who is trying? How do you decide that the trying is not enough when you can see, clearly, that it is more than they have ever managed before?
I do not have an answer. I am standing at the edge of one and I cannot see the bottom from here. I know that love is not a rescue mission and I know that I am not responsible for his healing and I know all the correct, healthy, boundaried things to know. I have read the books. I have had the therapy sessions. I have given the advice to other women in versions of this same story.
And yet here I am on a Sunday night, phone still warm from a conversation that left me feeling like I had run a long way without moving, writing this out because I have nowhere else to put it. Trying to figure out the difference between loving someone through their becoming and losing yourself in it. Trying to locate, honestly, which one this is.
What I know tonight is this: I love him, and I am not sure how much longer I can do it this way. Those two things are both completely true and they do not cancel each other out. I used to think they would, that one would eventually win. Now I think they might just have to live side by side in me until something shifts, in him, in me, in us, or until I find out what I am made of when love is not enough to make me stay.
I turned the light off an hour ago. I turned it back on to write this.
I still do not know what I am going to do.
You cannot pour into a person who has no bottom. The work of building that bottom is theirs to do.
