Member-only story
What Love Asks Us to Hold
Non-Members Read Here
We were told that love is a soft place to land.
A warm hand.
An unconditional folding of boundaries.
A perpetual permission slip to let someone else leak into us.
And so you softened where you should have reinforced.
You called extraction intimacy.
If you smiled through the draft, maybe the room would warm up.
If you absorbed their dissonance, maybe they would finally love you.
That wasn’t love.
That was management.
That was using your system as a sponge to soak up the wreckage of people who refused to anchor their own spine.
They called you cold when you stopped leaking.
They called you rigid when you refused to let them lean their weight against your frame.
They didn’t want a partner.
They wanted a life-support system.
You almost traded your structural integrity for the cheap, temporary comfort of being close to people who were terrified of truth.
But love isn’t a sedative.
