My therapist once said, “people don’t abandon the people they love, they abandon the people they’re using”—and for a while, that felt like closure. It let me draw a clean line: if someone left, they must have been using me. That thought gave me relief. But over time, I started to realise it was too neat. Too binary. The truth is, people can love you and still leave. Not because they were scheming, not because you failed—but because something in them couldn't stay. Fear, misalignment, emotional limitation. Love isn’t always enough to make someone choose closeness over safety.
What I’ve noticed is that so much of modern relationship advice thrives on this suspicion. It trains you to read between the lines of every interaction, to constantly ask: am I being used? Am I being manipulated? It dresses up as empowerment, but really it teaches you to live in a kind of low-level panic—always scanning for red flags, always bracing for betrayal. You’re not allowed to relax. Intimacy becomes something to win or survive, never something to simply be in.
But I don’t want a love that depends on constant vigilance. I don’t want my nervous system locked in fight-or-flight just to feel “safe.” That’s not safety—that’s a trauma loop. And ironically, all this psychologised advice that claims to protect me is what keeps me out of flow, out of presence. I’ve started to realise that if I really want to ascend, I have to let go of this fantasy of total control.
The truth is, I will be used sometimes. And I will use others too. That’s part of the messiness of human need. It doesn’t always mean harm. Love isn’t clean. It includes contradiction, incompatibility, confusion. Sometimes it ends. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.
I’m learning that not every trigger is a red flag. Not every ending is a betrayal. The real growth isn’t in mastering relationships so they never hurt—it’s in staying soft, staying honest, staying open even if they do. That's where my strength lives now. Not in avoiding pain, but in being someone who can absorb it and still stay true.