I Understand Why

For a long time, I asked myself the same questions over and over.

Why did I keep choosing love that hurt?

Why did longing feel normal to me?

Why did emotional distance feel familiar instead of alarming?

Why did I attach so deeply, forgive so quickly, and stay so long in situations that slowly starved me?

For years I tried to answer those questions by looking at the relationships themselves.

The men.

The circumstances.

The timing.

But the truth is much older than any of those things.

It lives in the first two people who taught me what love looked like.

My mom fought a lifelong battle with mental illness.

Her life was shaped by trauma and abandonment long before I was born. She carried wounds that never fully healed, and much of her life was spent fighting a war inside her own mind.

Because of that, she was often gone from the places where a mother is supposed to be.

She missed birthdays.

School events.

Ordinary days that quietly shape a childhood.

But from wherever she was, she loved me the best way she knew how.

She wrote letters.

She called.

Her voice on the phone could fill a room with warmth. She was quick with “I love you,” generous with praise, and able to lift me up with words that made me feel seen and special.

My mom could make me feel adored.

But she could not be present.

So love, for me, became something that lived at a distance.

Something you heard through a receiver.

Something written in ink on paper.

Something that arrived in bursts of affirmation but disappeared when real life was happening.

And my dad loved us in a different way.

He believed that if his children were fed, clothed, and had a roof over their heads, he had done his job.

In his mind, parenting was making sure we were safe and provided for.

Emotionally, he was somewhere else entirely.

There were no deep conversations.

No steady presence guiding us through the confusing terrain of growing up.

He was a good man in many ways.

But he was absent in the ways children quietly need the most.

So between the two of them, I learned something very early.

Love could exist.

Love could even be sincere.

But love was also inconsistent.

Distant.

Unavailable.

Something you held onto through long stretches of waiting.

Something you worked hard to keep.

Something you forgave over and over because you understood the pain the other person carried.

And when those are the first lessons you learn about love, they don’t stay in childhood.

They become the blueprint.

So of course I grew into someone who loved deeply.

Someone who could see the pain inside other people and meet it with compassion.

Someone who stayed.

Someone who forgave.

Someone who believed that if you loved hard enough, understood enough, and held on long enough, eventually the love would come back to you in full.

For most of my life, that was how I loved.

But the realization I’ve had over the last couple of years has changed something fundamental inside me.

I understood that the way I loved my parents did not have to be the way I loved in my intimate relationships.

Children love their parents without conditions.

They adapt.

They forgive.

They learn to survive on whatever pieces of love are available.

But adults do not have to build their lives that way.

Understanding why I loved the way I did does not mean I have to keep living inside that pattern.

It just means I can look at the younger version of me with compassion instead of confusion.

Of course she held on.

Of course she forgave.

Of course she believed love was something you waited for.

She was loving the only way she had ever been taught.

I understand why.

And because I understand why, I no longer confuse longing with love.

I no longer believe love has to be earned through patience, endurance, or forgiveness that stretches past my own well-being.

I no longer stay in places where affection is distant and presence is optional.

Understanding why didn’t just change how I see the past.

It changes how I live now.