228. Are we rehearsing detachment as a form of protection against real love?
I’ve been single for a while (here I am lamenting about it again but I truly haven’t complained about it in my blog in a while haha! I’ve been so busy in life that I haven’t had time to reflect!) I can tell you, you can build a good life. You can have friends who show up, and you show up for friends, work that fulfills you, hobbies that make you feel alive. You can get pretty close to whole. But we’re still wired for touch - for sex, for affection, for that soft physical intimacy that’s meant to feel safe only in the hands of someone who loves you.
And I say that as someone who’s tried to outsource it to get that closeness through “casualness”, like maybe I could trick my body into believing it’s safe. But it never is. You end up missing this part of yourself that only wakes up inside love- the sensual, the gentle, the deeply nurturing part that wants to care for someone and be cared for back.
That’s what makes me sad, honestly. Every time I get hopeful about a man, it feels like handing someone a very fragile thing and watching them drop it. They don’t know what to do with being loved. I’m perhaps also searching in the wrong places.
Romantic love is supposed to be allowed- even celebrated- but somehow we’ve raised a generation of people who can’t sustain it. Everyone wants it, but no one’s built for it.
To me, it seems like everyone is performing stability, performing self-sufficiency, performing that they don’t need anyone. And the cruel joke is that we actually do. We all do. We just don’t know how to admit it without sounding desperate. I sound desperate and I cringe about it often, but here I am trying to navigate this again. It’s a bit of a tricky thing to discuss with your coupled up friends.
I think about how tenderness has become something we ration out. How care has been rebranded as “too much.” How desire is only allowed if it’s ironic, never raw, never sincere. I miss the kind of love that makes you soften, not harden.
Sometimes I wonder if we are collectively grieving the same thing: the loss of mutual safety in love. Everyone is terrified of being the one who cares more. So we settle for almosts, situationships, long penpal text messages that go nowhere. We rehearse detachment until it becomes a skill.
And yet I know I’m built for depth. For that old kind of love where you feed each other and hold each other and think about grocery lists and dreams in the same breath. I can build a career, a community, a rich life, but that particular ache doesn’t go away. It just hums under everything else, waiting for someone brave enough to stay.
~ booo hooooooo (lmao),
<3 K