We have developed certain sentences that tend to circle the truth rather than land on it: Love is overrated. I’m not ready. Love these days is toxic. Men this, women that. These sentences travel fast, are widely agreed with, and sometimes they are earned wisdom. But sometimes they are carefully worded, socially acceptable armor. ALSO READ: The quiet power of a mother’s love It is hard to explain having someone good, and still feeling, in the chest, a kind of absence; heavy, unmoving. Not sadness exactly, not numbness or boredom, but a void where fullness should be. A solid emptiness. It is worth noting that there are many reasons love is difficult right now: the noise of a world that is always offering another, seemingly better option; our attempts to build stability on shifting ground; and the fact that our generation is, for the first time, actively constructing its own frameworks for what a relationship should be. However, there is another difficulty - and you may tire of me saying this - that much of this is a pattern we inherited from the communities we grew up in. ALSO READ: A generational curse that can be averted What makes this particular emptiness so disorienting is that there is no obvious cause in the present. The relationship is not bad. The person beside you is not unkind. The love, by any reasonable measure, is there. And yet something in the body does not fully register it. You can hear I love you clearly and still wonder; in a way you would be embarrassed to admit, whether you can believe it and let it settle or not. ALSO READ: Why marriage preparation is the foundation of good parenting So, it comes out sideways instead - in detachment, in deflection, in quiet withdrawal, in a restlessness that looks like dissatisfaction but is really something much older than the relationship it is directed toward. Because that emptiness, in most cases, did not begin with this partner, or this relationship, or even with love as an adult experience at all. It began in the first places where love was supposed to be learned. Many of us grew up in communities where feelings were managed, where love was shown through provision and practicality rather than through the softer, spoken forms of presence, and where vulnerability was, and still is, seen as a liability. We witnessed infidelities quietly normalized. We did not learn that love was impossible. We learned something arguably harder to unlearn: that love is unreliable. And so the nervous system drew its own quiet conclusion - that to love fully, to trust completely, to let someone all the way in, was not romantic. It was reckless. If full emotional expression is not safe, we learn to function without it. The tragedy is that this does not switch off when the conditions change. Years later, those same rules continue running quietly in the background, even when the person across from you is nothing like the environment that created them. So, when someone says they are not ready, or that love is toxic, they may be giving language to an internal experience they cannot access more directly. It is far easier to describe a generation as broken than to say: I do not know how to receive this. I want to. I just don’t know how yet. However, all of this is not evidence of some fundamental inability to love and be loved. It is evidence that you learned to protect yourself with extraordinary skill. And that the next task is learning, slowly, how to put some of that down. The writer is a psychiatric nurse, exploring the emotional landscapes we rarely talk about.
