Some people spend their whole lives looking for one thing: that one kind of connection you don’t have to explain.
Not “we fit well,” not “we function together,” but that raw attraction you feel in your body. Like you knew someone before you knew them.
We had that.
We’d known each other for twenty years – family, second cousins – long before anything romantic was ever in the air. We were simply part of each other’s history. And then, much later, something shifted. Not slowly. Not carefully. It was as if a door opened that had been there the whole time.
And after that, it was impossible to pretend it wasn’t real.
Something rare
What we had wasn’t something you can fake.
It was in the way we looked at each other. In how we missed each other. In the quiet certainty of “you.” In the charge that never fully disappeared, even on days when everything felt ordinary and dull. It was love with electricity.
The kind of attraction that makes some people cynical because they’ve never felt it. Or makes people go silent because they have – and they once lost it.
We still had it.
And that’s exactly why we stayed.
Again and again.
And yet it went wrong
Not with one big explosion.
But with a thousand small cracks.
A conversation that was “just a quick thing,” and two hours later it still wasn’t over.
A boundary that felt like rejection.
A question that wasn’t really a question, but a test.
A silence that instantly became panic.
An attempt at peace that turned into another fight.
We could touch each other so deeply that we could also hurt each other deeply.
And the worst part was: it became less and less about what was happening now, and more and more about what it triggered inside us. As if two adults were in the room, but two frightened children were secretly fighting for the steering wheel.
It became a pattern
One of us needed certainty. Calm. Reassurance. Now.
The other needed space. Air. Silence. Now.
When fear showed up, one of us held on tighter.
When pressure showed up, the other tried to escape.
The tighter the grip, the stronger the urge to run.
The more distance, the sharper the fear.
And the sharper the fear, the tighter the grip again.
We became addicted to tension. Not because it was fun – but because our nervous systems recognized it as familiar. As urgent. As something that had to be solved, or else something terrible would happen.
And after every fight came the same hangover:
a hollow feeling in the body, like having the flu.
no energy for work, for training, for friends.
as if life had been drained out of you for a while.
The tragedy
What destroyed us wasn’t a lack of love.
What destroyed us was that love doesn’t automatically become safety.
Attraction isn’t a foundation. It’s fire.
And fire is beautiful – until you use it to stay warm inside a house that’s slowly collapsing.
We spent so much time holding on, explaining, defending, correcting, that we forgot how to live. We became less like partners and more like each other’s project. Less like love and more like survival.
And that kind of self-destruction can be very quiet:
you stay together, you say “we love each other,” and meanwhile, something breaks off every week.
What people don’t like to hear
Some relationships don’t fall apart because they weren’t real.
Some fall apart because they were too real… and too heavy.
Because you hit each other’s wounds perfectly.
Because you speak each other’s triggers fluently.
Because the attraction is so strong that you stay, even when you’ve known for a long time that it’s destroying you.
At some point, the question stops being “do we love each other?”
And becomes: “can we carry this without losing ourselves?”
The ending that lingers
You can read all the psychology books.
You can consume a thousand years of literature.
You can learn to name every pattern, understand every wound, try to have every conversation a little better.
And still, sometimes it turns out to be painfully simple:
Love isn’t enough.
And sometimes the best thing you can do is admit that there are some things you simply…
don’t get over.