I Didn't Need More Love. I Needed to Feel Loved.
Not a story about falling out of love. A story about discovering why love never quite reached me.
The loneliest years of my life weren’t the years after my divorce. They were the years I spent trying to feel loved.
Today my kids and their father, my ex, are coming home from vacation. I know that they’d be coming back to his home, to an empty fridge. They’d be arriving after the shops had closed, and nothing would be open the next day. So without anyone asking me for a favour or anything, I went shopping for them.
Ingredients for a quick pasta sauce, because they’d be hungry when they arrived late. Cucumber, because kids need vegetables. Nectarines, because they are their favorite of the season. Good bread. Italian mortadella. Fresh fruit juice for breakfast.
No one asked me to notice those things.
No one asked me to think two meals ahead.
That’s simply how I love people.
As expected, he asked me if I’d have something home for their dinner—Hours later than I had already been thinking about it.
I enjoy tending to the details. Giving my best to the people I love has never exhausted me. What exhausted me was discovering, yet again, that I was tending to those details alone. It was the disappointment of never receiving that same thoughtfulness in return. Eventually, it drained the last bit of energy from me.
People can’t know what you want just like that. You need to communicate. Make yourself understood. — I would hear this kind of advice over and over again. It would’ve been unrealistic to expect magical telepathy. So I tried to communicate.
I asked about a cup of tea.
Which tea?
Sugar?
How hot?
In which cup?
Where’s the tea bag?
I couldn’t make up my mind.
Let me know when you decide. He’d say.
Every little thing had to be translated. Then, I ran out of energy from constantly teaching someone how to care for me.
~
Why don’t you just ask?
He used to say it to me all the time. Even now, some friends still ask me the same thing.
As if the joke is all on me because I didn’t open my mouth and ask.
What about noticing my needs before I ask? Maybe not in the beginning. But after years of sharing a life together? Some reciprocation would have gone a long way. It would have made me feel less alone inside the relationship.
For years I thought this was about communication— If only I found a better way to communicate.
Until I realized it wasn’t.
I was confusing communication with something more important:
Attunement.
Communication listens to words. Hot and cold are just words.
Attunement sees me rubbing my hands together and quietly closes the window before I say I’m cold.
We could learn better ways to communicate. But I could never teach someone to notice the world the way I naturally do.
Once I had words for it, I finally understood why I’d struggled for so long.
For more than 20 years, I struggled trying not to equate his actions with how loved I felt. I know love can’t be measured, either in quantity or in quality.
Love is to be felt. And I love people the way I want to be loved.
I’ve never liked soccer, or dinosaurs before my sons came into my life. Now I’m genuinely interested in them because my sons are. Not to please them. But because they are part of their worlds.
To me, love is not a thousand balloons or 100 red roses on my birthday. Love is when I come home exhausted, feeling a little weighed down by this world, he sees it from the way my shoulders fall the moment I come home. He’d make my favorite coffee just the way I love it and tell me, “Don’t worry about dinner”.
It’s not the same as having to explain that I was too exhausted to cook and hearing “Of course, darling”.
I can ask.
I just don’t want to have to ask all the time.
~
Every time I had to summon the energy to explain, I felt like we were not sharing a life.
I was rehearsing one.
~
When I told people I divorced because I wanted to experience the kind of love I longed for, the reactions varied. Some looked at me as if I were being selfish. Others admired my courage for leaving safety to pursue what seemed like an impossible dream.
Selfish or courageous. Right or wrong. Neither was the point to me. I was simply answering a question only I could answer.
There was enough love.
I left because I finally understood our hearts didn’t speak the same kind of language. And I was tired of translating mine.
At last, I know what feeling loved means to me.
Being noticed before I have to explain.
The kind of care that arrives instinctively.
….. ….. ….. ….
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A request can get the need met and still leave the loneliness untouched.
The tea arrives, but only after you have named the cup, measured the heat, located the bag, and managed the care from beginning to end. By then, you have not been tended to. You have supervised your own tenderness.
The distinction between being loved and actually feeling loved is so important. The line about growing tired of translating your heart says everything: love may be present, but without attunement it can still leave someone profoundly alone.