Almost Love
reflections from January
The word keeps finding me.
Limerence.
It floats through my feed like a question that knows my name. It appears beside breakups and grief, beside people trying to understand love after it collapses. I pay attention to what repeats. I always have.
I wonder if this word could hold me. If it could explain my history. If maybe I have never been in love at all. Maybe everything was longing. Projection. Hunger dressed up as devotion. Limerence would be easier. It would let me move on cleanly. It would say this was about my work, my confusion, my unfinished growing.
But the deeper I go, the more I know.
I wish it had been limerence.
It was not.
What I am learning is that love does not fail just because the other person cannot meet it. People arrive at relationships only as far as they have arrived at themselves.
Some spend their lives avoiding that arrival.
I loved someone who told me they lied as a way of moving through the world. Casually. Strategically. To keep things smooth. To manage how others felt. I watched it happen in real time: a lie offered to a colleague, another to a parent, another to a child, all within minutes. When she noticed I had seen, there was a laugh. A softening gesture. As if humor could erase the moment.
My body went still. I laughed too. Sometimes survival sounds like laughter.
It was not unusual behavior. It was a rhythm. I was told this was normal. That honesty causes discomfort. That comfort mattered more than truth. That peace was something performed into existence. I remember being promised that this time there would be honesty about their relationship. I did not ask for that confession. I only asked not to be lied to. Later I learned that promise was another heartfelt lie.
Bodies tell the truth anyway through shifts in voice, eyes that will not settle, a tightening around the mouth. We notice these things even when the conversation keeps moving.
I wanted an answer that would release me. Something that would absolve me of grief. The truth is heavier. I stayed when my body asked me to leave. I accepted repeated promises that never altered the pattern. I kept believing we were moving toward the same future.
I kept believing honesty would bring us closer.
Instead, the closer we got to anything real, the more confusing it felt for me.
When someone cannot stay honest with themselves, connection starts to fill with projection.
It feels intense, and it is thin.
It feels consuming, and it does not hold.
I was not infatuated. I was invested. I forgave because I believed forgiveness was how love survived. I stayed because I believed endurance meant devotion. I still do not fully know where devotion ended and self-erasure began. Sometimes people cannot grow alongside you. That does not make them monsters. It makes them unavailable.
I am angry. Mostly with myself. I am grieving. My child was pulled into the rupture, and my body finally stopped negotiating. When I said this is too much, I became the problem. When I named my limits, I became the villain.
I see now how harm was redirected outward. How stories were built to avoid responsibility. I no longer need to understand that architecture. It is not my shelter.
What I know is this:
I was not limerent.
I was in love.
I made choices that cost me because I believed love meant staying no matter what happened to me.
Love does not feel like confusion.
Love does not ask for disappearance.
Love does not demand that you betray your body, your child or your knowing.
pictures from Jan
