Holding love after endurance

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about love. Not because it stopped mattering, but because I stopped needing to reach for it in words. After my first book was published, something in me settled. Love was no longer a question I was trying to solve intellectually; it became something I was living through; quietly, imperfectly, often without commentary. There are seasons where reflection feels necessary, and others where simply living becomes the reflection itself. Lately, though, I’ve felt a gentle pull back toward articulation. Not urgency. Not nostalgia. Just a desire to witness, in words, the person I’ve become in relation to love.

For much of my life, I understood love through effort. I believed it was something earned through endurance, sustained by patience, compromise, and the quiet swallowing of unmet needs. I confused loyalty with self-erasure. I stayed in an unhappy marriage longer than I should have because perseverance felt morally superior to departure, and because admitting misalignment felt like failure.

With time, and more honesty than I once allowed myself, I’ve come to recognize something difficult but clarifying: I cared deeply, I was committed, I genuinely wanted stability and partnership. But I was never fully in love. Not in the way that feels expansive, alive, and mutually grounding. We met young, moved quickly, and before I understood my own emotional landscape, I had already begun shaping myself around someone else’s needs. Three months in, we were building a life. Fourteen years later, I was still trying to make sense of how I had quietly disappeared inside it.

At the time, I called it devotion. I told myself this was adulthood; showing up, making it work, prioritizing the relationship above individual comfort. But underneath that narrative was something more vulnerable: fear of instability, fear of disappointing someone, fear of confronting the possibility that compatibility cannot be forced into existence through sheer goodwill. So I kept adapting. Softening my edges. Silencing my preferences. Even ignoring the things I clearly didn’t want. And over time, the absence of authentic desire became harder to distinguish from the presence of commitment.

This realization didn’t arrive dramatically. It arrived slowly, almost reluctantly, and with a surprising amount of grief; not because I wished the past away, but because I finally understood how long I had lived slightly out of alignment with myself. There was sadness in that recognition, but also compassion. We were both trying, both working with the emotional awareness we had then. No villain. No failure. Just two people moving forward before fully understanding themselves.

When that chapter ended, clarity didn’t rush in. What came first was fatigue; the kind that settles deep in the body after years of sustained emotional effort. It felt less like awakening and more like exhaling after holding my breath for a very long time.

Re-entering the world of connection afterward was humbling. Dating in my late thirties and forties, particularly within the architecture of apps and curated identities, forced me to confront how much of myself I was still discovering. I met thoughtful people, kind people, guarded people, luminous people. Some connections offered healing. Others mirrored unresolved patterns back to me with uncomfortable precision. I saw how easily I could still overextend, how quickly I equated intensity with meaning, how instinctively I took responsibility for emotional equilibrium even when it wasn’t mine to carry.

Those experiences weren’t mistakes, though they sometimes hurt like they were. They were instruction. Love, I began to understand, is not simply about who we meet; it’s about the version of ourselves we bring into those meetings. And for a long time, I brought a self still shaped by survival, generous, yes, but cautious about fully occupying my own emotional space.

One of the more sobering truths I’ve encountered is that love doesn’t disappear when it goes unreturned. It lingers, in the nervous system, in memory, in subtle habits of hope and hesitation. Love offered sincerely is never wasted, but it does leave an imprint. Sometimes tenderness. Sometimes grief. Often both. The real work isn’t avoiding love; it’s learning how to offer it without abandoning oneself.

Becoming a single parent clarified this more than any romantic relationship ever could. Love stopped being conceptual and became daily practice. Reliability. Patience. Emotional presence even when tired or distracted. My daughter doesn’t need perfection; she needs steadiness. And children have an extraordinary sensitivity to authenticity. She has, unknowingly, invited me to become the version of myself I once hoped someone else would meet; grounded, attentive, emotionally available without performance.

Parenthood stripped love of spectacle. There’s no audience. No dramatic declarations. Just continuity. Showing up again tomorrow. And the day after. That rhythm has reshaped how I understand romantic love as well. I no longer associate depth with volatility. I associate it with safety, ease, and the freedom to remain fully oneself.

These days, love feels quieter inside me. Less urgent. Less entangled with validation. I don’t feel the same compulsion to be chosen because I’m no longer abandoning myself in order to be. There’s dignity in building a life that feels whole on its own terms; fatherhood, friendships, work, creativity, solitude, and allowing connection to emerge as enrichment rather than remedy.

This isn’t detachment. It’s discernment. I still believe deeply in love, perhaps more than ever, but I no longer romanticize struggle as proof of depth. Love, at its healthiest, should expand one’s capacity for truth, not require its suppression. It should calm the nervous system more often than it agitates it. It should allow both people to remain distinct individuals while building something shared.

There is grief in acknowledging how much love I once gave without asking whether it was safe to do so. But there is also tenderness for the man who did that. He wasn’t foolish; he was hopeful. He wasn’t weak; he simply hadn’t yet learned that self-respect and love are not competing values.

What matters most to me now is alignment. Living in a way that honors the love I carry rather than dispersing it indiscriminately. Modeling emotional health for my daughter not through perfection, but through presence, accountability, and self-respect. Remaining open without becoming porous. Strong without becoming guarded.

Love, I’ve come to believe, matures as we do. It becomes less about being chosen and more about choosing consciously, honesty, boundaries, reciprocity, emotional responsibility. The love we attract often mirrors the love we are finally willing to extend to ourselves.

Writing this doesn’t feel like confession. It feels like integration. A gathering of chapters that once felt fragmented into something coherent. The marriage, the heartbreak, the rediscovery, the parenting, the solitude, the hope; none of it wasted. All of it formative.

And as for the future; I don’t approach it with urgency anymore. There is openness, but not hunger. Curiosity, but not restlessness. If love arrives, I imagine it will feel less like rescue and more like recognition. Two people meeting not out of need, but out of readiness. Not to complete each other, but to accompany one another with steadiness, honesty, and a shared willingness to remain whole.

I’m not finished. I doubt any of us ever truly are. But I do feel aligned. And perhaps that alignment; quiet, grounded, unforced; is itself a form of love I once spent years searching for outside myself.


— Sincerely, Boris