I knew I no longer loved my ex-boyfriend for months before we broke up.
It was cruel of me to stay for as long as I did. Though I didn’t love him anymore and ending the relationship crossed my mind often, I was never brave enough to act on it. Instead, I shackled us both to a sinking ship, holding on to something I knew was already gone. As I watched us approach our end, I found myself revising our time together, draining out whatever emotion that once lived there and replacing it with the indifference I now felt for him.
I knew I had loved him once. I could remember the times I wished for him, yearned for him, thought of little beyond him—his skin, his scent. But those moments were frayed at their edges, touched as they were by this new infectious perspective of mine that left them flattened and impersonal; something I can recall, but not vivid enough to call them my memories.
There was no grand finale to this relationship—only a slow petering out, a quiet, quiet death, and the knowledge that I didn’t love him, didn’t hate him, didn’t really feel anything towards him at all.
In hindsight, there was one major failing: we never fought.
The two long-term relationships I’ve been in had little in common except for a lack of fighting. At the time, this felt like an accomplishment. Wasn’t the quiet of our relationship evidence of how good we were together? They were fine. I was fine. We were always fine. I think I loathe feeling fine, at least in my relationships, mostly because it means I am not feeling much at all.
To understand why this lack of fighting was so devastating, let me first define what I think love is. What is love’s purpose? Is it to make us happy? That feels too vague. Why is commitment to another person something we centre as a defining feature of existence—something people have built lives around, destroyed lives over, even fought wars for—only for it to fizzle out or fade for seemingly no reason?
I think love is something else entirely. Love is a phenomenon, and an inexplicable one at that. Love is a something-unknown that tears at your skin and settles in your marrow; a whisper in your ear and the beat of your heart; something that pains as much as it blesses; a nonpareil we are only so lucky as to keep if we work for it. Love is work: a dream job you spent hours to achieve, gave sleepless nights to, screamed about, hated, but kept coming back to, because it was worth it to you.
The issue is, this isn’t what we are taught love is. Love is framed as blissful, or easy, or as natural as falling asleep. When we are trained to think this way about love, we are unprepared for the labour it takes to sustain and keep it. This framework of thinking is something we must abandon.
Letting go of what you think love or a relationship “should be” creates space to fight meaningfully and productively, leaving your relationship all the stronger for it. In my last relationship, I spent a lot of time focused on what our love “should” be—how it should look, how it should appear to others—that I avoided conflict because it didn’t fit that idealized image. If it didn’t fit the mold I had created in my mind, it was something bad, something to hide, something to be ashamed of. Avoidance did not save us, clearly. It led to our lack of fighting, and a lack of care for the relationship at all.
In love, letting go of the perfect is vital to achieve the meaningful.
Allow the imperfections. Care enough about the other person to bring them up. To fight is to look at a wound—raw, open, ugly— and spread a balm then bear the sting it brings. To fight is to dress and redress an old injury, mending it better until you’re left with well-earned scars, precious if only for the fact that you cared to heal the cut at all.
The conflict love asks of us is not an existential threat. It is not a warning or a sign of worse things to come. Instigating can be another person asking to be heard, and responding can be telling them you want to hear them. Fighting is evidence that you care enough about the other person to want something to change. Let them see you, and the parts of you that might not always be easy to love, and let them love you anyway.
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