I used to think love stories began when two people met. Today, after everything that has happened, I think they begin much earlier: in the homes where we grew up, in the ways we first received love, in the things we feared before we had words for them, in the moments when we learned what it meant to feel wanted or rejected, in the people who left, the places we lost, and the ideas we formed about ourselves and what it means to be loved by someone else. When we meet someone and fall in love, all of this comes with us, including the things we thought we had left behind years ago.
I did not know this when I entered one of the most important relationships of my life. I entered it as an adult, a journalist who had lived in more than one world, left one country and tried to build a life in another, worked, written, travelled, loved before, failed before, and believed he knew himself reasonably well. I was independent in many parts of my life, capable of facing real crises and making major decisions on my own. Then I discovered that love has a strange ability to reach places in us that the rest of life cannot. A person can face the world with courage, and then a message from someone he loves arrives late and an old fear suddenly appears, wildly disproportionate to such a small event. That was when I began to realise that the adult man I knew was not the only person inside the relationship.
I loved intensely. When I love someone, I want to know the details: what happened during his day, what annoyed him, what made him laugh, what he wants to eat, what thought stayed in his head before he fell asleep. I have always loved the small rituals of everyday life more than grand occasions, because intimacy, to me, lives in that simple moment when you come home and have someone to whom you can say, “You won’t believe what happened to me today.” I wanted that ordinary life in which another person’s presence gradually becomes part of the natural rhythm of your day.
But beside this capacity for attachment lived an equally powerful fear. The closer I became to someone, the more valuable there was to lose. I could feel safe and then, sometimes without even realising it, begin searching for the sign that this safety was under threat. I would love, then become frightened by how much I now had to lose. For a long time, I treated my emotions as evidence of what was happening outside my own mind. If I felt afraid, there must be danger. If I felt jealous, there must be a reason. If I sensed someone pulling away, then surely he was pulling away.
It took me a long time to understand a distinction that seems obvious to me now: emotions are real, but their interpretation of reality is not always accurate. My fear is real. What my fear tells me is about to happen may never happen at all.
Psychology uses the idea of attachment to describe, among other things, how we learn to become close to others, trust them, and respond to distance, uncertainty and the possibility of loss. I was not thinking about any of this while I was living the relationship. I simply thought: I love him. Looking back, however, I can see that love was never the only thing in the room. My history was there too: a child who learned that the world was not as stable as it appeared, a young man who lived in a country where the shape of life itself could change quickly, and later an adult who experienced displacement and discovered that the word “home” could become far more complicated than an address, a key and a door.
Perhaps that is why love eventually became connected, for me, to something larger than the relationship itself. At some point, I stopped seeing only two people who loved each other and began seeing a future: a home, a family, an everyday life, growing old together. My dreams were not particularly extraordinary. I wanted to wake up next to the same person years later, to know each other’s annoying habits, to argue about ridiculous things and then continue with our day, to decide what to cook, to have plants that needed watering, bills that needed paying, beautiful days and boring ones. I wanted an ordinary life. Perhaps ordinariness was especially seductive to me because so much of my life had been anything but ordinary.
What I did not understand then was how much psychological weight I had placed inside that dream. Somewhere underneath “Does this person love me?” were other questions: Will he stay? Will he choose me tomorrow too? Can I finally relax? Have I reached the place where I will no longer have to begin again? I never asked those questions so explicitly, but I can see them now in many of my reactions. Sometimes I was asking the relationship for something larger than love. I wanted it to give me a permanent sense of safety.
This may be one of the most painful things I learned after the breakup. Sometimes we ask the people we love for things without even knowing that we are asking. I never said to someone I loved: repair everything that happened to me before you and make sure I never experience loss again. Yet some part of me wanted love to prove that I was chosen, that I was enough, and that the person I loved would stay. When our sense of safety depends entirely on another person’s promise to remain, love is being asked to provide a guarantee that no human being can give. People change. We change. Life intervenes. Sometimes love itself changes, and sometimes love remains while the relationship loses its ability to survive.
After a relationship ends, it is remarkably easy to build a courtroom inside your head. I did that for a long time. Who was wrong? Who started it? Who hurt whom more? Who could have saved us? I replayed conversations, situations and decisions, constructing alternative versions of the past: if I had said this instead of that, if I had not gone there, if he had understood me in that moment, if I had understood him, if we had waited, if we had spoken differently. The mind loves the words “what if” because they create the illusion that the past is still available for revision.
That is no longer what interests me most. I want to understand who I was inside that relationship, what I was trying to protect when I became angry, jealous, frightened, or desperate for reassurance. At the same time, I have begun accepting something that was once much harder for me: I do not fully know what was happening inside the other person. I knew a great deal about him. We shared enormous parts of our lives and I saw him in many different states, but I never lived inside his mind. Perhaps one of my mistakes was occasionally believing that the intensity of my love gave me the ability to know what he felt or why he behaved in a particular way. Love can bring us extraordinarily close to another human being. It does not give us access to his thoughts.
Nearly three months have passed since the relationship ended. I cannot say that I have become a different person, and I have no desire to turn the experience into a neat story about heartbreak making me stronger and wiser. Some things simply hurt. I still miss him. There are still days when the past returns with such force that it feels as though it happened this morning. But something has slowly begun to change: I am learning to create a small distance between what I feel and what I do because of that feeling. When I am afraid, I try to ask myself what exactly I am afraid of before I act. When I miss someone, I try not to turn longing immediately into action. And when it feels as though I have lost my future, I remind myself that I lost a future I had imagined, not the future itself.
The difference is only a few words. In life, it is enormous.
Perhaps that is why I am writing this series. I do not want to explain why a relationship failed, and I do not want to use writing to publish my version of another person. I want to understand what happens to us when we love, what we unknowingly carry into love, and how some of our oldest fears can suddenly reappear inside our most adult relationships. For a long time after the breakup, one question followed me everywhere: Why did someone I loved leave me? Gradually, that question changed. It became more difficult, but perhaps more useful: Who was I when I loved him?
For the first time, I am trying to answer without condemning the man I was and without excusing everything he did. I simply want to understand him. Because when I entered that relationship, I thought I was going to meet another person. I did not know that my childhood, my country, my displacement, my fears, my longing for home, and every person I had been before that moment were all coming with me to the first date.
Next: Part Two — When Another Person Becomes Home.