Some loves don’t end with drama. No betrayal. No big fight. No final goodbye yelled into a rainy night. Just slow unspooling. You find yourself thinking of them less and less. The texts become fewer. Then the pauses between replies stretch longer — before being ignored even becomes a thing. And then… there’s just no feeling. The phone calls are shorter, the silences longer. There’s awkwardness. And that strange moment when you realize the laughter isn’t quite the same, and neither of you knows how to ask why.
I used to think love had to last to be real — that if the feelings faded, then maybe it wasn’t love to begin with. But life, ha! I think now, more and more, that some of the deepest loves don’t stay. They arrive to teach you something. To stretch your heart. To open a door. And then they leave.
This is about one of those loves.
We didn’t end in anger. In fact, I feel guilt sometimes — because I ended up feeling nothing. Well, not nothing exactly… maybe a kind of passive-aggressive bitterness. A resentment that came not from betrayal but from boredom. From realizing that we were growing in different directions — slowly enough for us both to notice. It became clear that he wasn’t as motivated to stop the disintegration of us, and I was a little too tired to keep denying that the shape of us had changed. And the truth? I didn’t quite feel the loss.
Still, I remember the mornings that felt sacred. The inside jokes that made no sense to anyone else. The ways we tried. The moments we got it right. The warmth and joy and spark of it. The fire. The chemistry. The romance. The tenderness. The urgency. I remember all of it, and I (mostly) don’t regret it.
I think this might have been the first time I could look back at a relationship and feel that I was actually ready for a love to end. That loving someone and not wanting to keep them wasn’t a betrayal of my romantic ideals. And that I didn’t need to vilify him to make sense of the ending. I could simply say: he loved me — maybe not in the way I needed forever, but in the way he could, then. And that was how it was meant to be.
I still find myself wondering whether it’s okay to file this under loved and gladly shelved. I mean, I don’t think I get to decide the categories of love. Maybe they were set by the gods or the ancestors long ago — that not every love is meant to be permanent, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t valid. There’s comfort in that, I think.
Not every ending is a failure. Sometimes it’s just a quiet closing of a chapter.
So aside from the small-small sadness, the soft ache of parting, I carry a kind of gratitude. A softness around the memory of a love that was real, even if it didn’t last. A love that mattered — for as long as it did.
I wonder if this is how it is with some friendships too.
sigh