The Work of Loving Another Person

Love is one of the few experiences most of us enter with enormous hope and very little preparation. We may know how to recognize attraction, how to imagine a future with someone, and how to surrender ourselves to the excitement of being chosen. What we are rarely taught is how to remain in a relationship once another person becomes fully real to us—once they can no longer carry our fantasies without disappointing them, once our own wounds begin to shape what we see, and once love asks for something more difficult than feeling deeply. It asks us to become capable of encountering another person as they are, while also becoming more honest about who we are in their presence.

The Fantasy of Love

We spend a great deal of our lives learning how to fall in love, but remarkably little time learning what it means to love another person. From an early age we are surrounded by stories that promise love as a kind of arrival. There is someone out there who will finally understand us, complete us, and make us feel at home in ourselves. When we find them, we imagine that the uncertainty of our lives will begin to settle. The loneliness that has followed us for years will somehow loosen its grip, conflict will become the exception rather than the rule, and happiness will finally feel secure. Whether we recognize it or not, many of us carry this quiet fantasy into our relationships. We do not simply hope to love another person; we hope that love itself will rescue us from the ordinary disappointments of being human.

It is a beautiful hope. It is also one that places an impossible burden upon another person.

Most of us don’t begin a relationship expecting perfection. If someone asked us directly, we would probably deny it. We know people are flawed. We know relationships require effort. We have all heard that communication is important and that conflict is inevitable. Yet there is often a surprising distance between what we know intellectually and what we experience emotionally. It only takes a painful argument, a season of feeling misunderstood, or the slow realization that our partner continues to disappoint us in familiar ways before another question quietly emerges beneath the surface: What if I chose the wrong person?

That question says far less about the relationship than it does about the story we have inherited about love.

One of the more difficult things I have come to appreciate, both in my work as a therapist and in my own life, is that relationships rarely reveal themselves during the beginning. The beginning belongs to possibility. We are captivated by one another. Differences seem interesting rather than frustrating. Habits that will later become sources of irritation are barely noticed. There is a generosity that naturally accompanies new love because so much remains unknown. We are not pretending during this season. The feelings are real. The excitement is real. Yet we are relating as much to our hopes for one another as to the person who is actually standing before us. Time has not yet done its quiet work of introducing us to each other’s fears, defenses, disappointments, and contradictions.

Eventually, though, every relationship becomes more ordinary. Daily routines replace long conversations that once stretched late into the night. Responsibilities accumulate. Stress enters. We become tired. We become distracted. We begin reacting to one another instead of simply enjoying one another. This is often the moment people conclude that something important has been lost. I have become less convinced that this is true. More often than not, this is the moment when the real relationship finally begins.

What has been lost is not necessarily love itself, but the protection that possibility once offered us. In the beginning, neither person has yet had enough time to become fully disappointing. We can still imagine that the other will eventually understand us in all the ways we have longed to be understood. Ordinary life gradually interrupts that imagination. The person we love turns out to be a person: limited, distracted, wounded, occasionally selfish, and unable to reach us every time we need to be reached.

What We Ask Love to Repair

We do not bring only our present-day selves into a relationship. We also bring the accumulated experience of every earlier relationship that taught us what closeness might cost, how available another person could be, and what we had to do to remain connected. Long before we meet a partner, we have already begun forming expectations about whether others will stay, whether our needs will be welcomed, whether conflict threatens the relationship, and whether it is safe to reveal how deeply we care.

This is part of what gives intimate relationships their unusual emotional force. We may be arguing about a missed phone call, a forgotten conversation, or the expression that crossed someone’s face at dinner. Yet, the intensity of the moment often exceeds the event itself. Something older has been touched. The forgotten conversation becomes evidence that we do not matter. A request for space becomes the beginning of abandonment. A criticism becomes confirmation that, once fully known, we will be found disappointing.

Without recognizing it, we may ask another person to answer questions that began long before they arrived: Am I important enough to be remembered? Am I desirable enough to be chosen again? Can I need someone without eventually becoming too much for them? Will you remain present when I am difficult, frightened, angry, or ashamed?

There is nothing shameful about bringing these longings into love. We all want relationships that offer some measure of healing, safety, and recognition. The problem begins when the other person is no longer allowed to be separate from the role we need them to perform. We stop seeing them as another person and begin judging them by whether they have finally repaired what others left unfinished.

This may be why the thought that we chose the wrong person can arrive so quickly after disappointment. The fear is not always simply that this relationship is imperfect. It may be that love itself has failed to provide the rescue we were promised. Beneath the question, What if I chose the wrong person? there may be another, more painful question: Why has being loved still not made me feel safe?

What Another Person Reveals in Us

Loving another person has a way of exposing parts of ourselves that we could not have discovered on our own. We often imagine that relationships exist to help us understand our partner, but one of their quieter gifts is that they reveal us to ourselves. We discover how quickly we become defensive when we feel criticized. We notice how difficult it is to admit that we were wrong. We begin to see the subtle ways we withdraw when we fear rejection, and the ways we seek reassurance when closeness feels uncertain. These responses rarely appear out of nowhere. They have often been with us for years, quietly shaping the way we move through the world without ever demanding our attention. It is simply that another person, by loving us closely enough, eventually brings them into the light.

The difficulty is that we usually experience these responses first as reactions to what the other person has done. We feel ignored, criticized, controlled, or rejected, and our attention immediately shifts to their failure. It is much harder to notice what is happening inside us: the shame that has become anger, the fear that has become accusation, or the longing for reassurance that has disguised itself as criticism.

There are moments in relationships when we are not only trying to be understood. We are trying to compel the other person to confirm our version of reality. We want them to admit that we are the injured one, that they are the cause of the problem, and that our response was therefore entirely justified. Certainty protects us from the more vulnerable possibility that both people may be suffering, both may have contributed to the distance, and neither may possess the complete account of what occurred.

This is one of the reasons I have grown increasingly skeptical of the idea that successful relationships are those without conflict. Conflict tells us remarkably little by itself. Two people can avoid disagreement for years while remaining profoundly distant from one another. Another couple may argue regularly yet continue growing in honesty, tenderness, and understanding. The presence of conflict is not nearly as important as what happens within it. Do we become curious about one another, or do we retreat into certainty? Do we continue trying to understand the world our partner is living in, or do we become preoccupied with proving that our own experience is the correct one? These questions matter far more than whether disagreement exists at all.

A relationship, therefore, asks more of us than self-expression does. It asks for self-observation. We must gradually become able to notice not only what we feel, but what we do with what we feel. Do we speak from hurt, or make the other person hurt? Do we ask directly for closeness, or punish them for failing to anticipate our need? Do we reveal that we are frightened, or reach instead for the protection of anger, contempt, silence, or withdrawal?

This is among the most difficult forms of responsibility in love: recognizing that our feelings are real without assuming that every action flowing from them is justified.

The Mystery of Another Person

Perhaps this is one of the more humbling truths about loving another person: intimacy does not eliminate misunderstanding. If anything, it creates more opportunities for it. No matter how deeply we care for someone, they remain another consciousness, another history, another way of seeing the world that can never fully become our own. There will always be moments when we fail to understand one another, just as there will be moments when we ourselves feel unseen. The goal, then, cannot be perfect understanding. It can only be the willingness to keep returning to one another after a misunderstanding.

Familiarity can sometimes make this harder rather than easier. Over time, we accumulate explanations for the other person. We know how they tend to respond, what they usually mean, and which old wound we believe is being activated. This knowledge can be helpful, but it can also quietly become a substitute for curiosity. We begin responding to the person we think we know rather than to the person who is currently trying to speak.

There is a subtle violence in believing we have finished understanding someone. The other person becomes boxed in by our interpretation of them: selfish, avoidant, needy, controlling, oversensitive, incapable of change. Once this happens, even their efforts to reach us may be absorbed into the story we have already formed. Whatever they do becomes further evidence that we were right about who they are.

It strikes me that much of the work of love is found precisely here. Not in the excitement of discovering someone new, but in the far quieter practice of discovering the same person over and over again. We slowly learn what frightens them, what brings them comfort, where they become ashamed, and how they ask for love without always knowing they are asking for it. We begin recognizing that much of what first appeared as stubbornness may actually be fear. What looked like indifference may have been uncertainty. What felt like rejection may have been someone trying, however imperfectly, to protect themselves from being hurt. None of these discoveries excuse behavior that wounds us, nor do they remove the need for boundaries, accountability, or honest conversations. They invite us to pause before concluding that we have fully understood another person.

To love someone may therefore involve preserving a certain openness around them. It means allowing the possibility that they are more complicated than our grievance, more alive than the role they have come to occupy in our mind, and still capable of surprising us.

The older I become, the less interested I find myself in the question of whether two people are perfectly compatible. Compatibility has always seemed to me less like something two people discover than something they gradually create. It emerges from hundreds of ordinary conversations, countless small acts of repair, moments of forgiveness, and the slow accumulation of trust that develops when two imperfect people continue to choose one another despite having every opportunity to walk away. Love, in this sense, is less a feeling we sustain than a way of relating that we slowly practice.

The Necessity of Repair

Every meaningful relationship contains rupture. We misunderstand, fail to respond, speak carelessly, become defensive, or protect ourselves in ways that leave the other person alone. Even in loving relationships, two nervous systems, two histories, and two sets of needs will sometimes collide. The question is not whether injury can be eliminated, but whether the relationship has enough honesty and flexibility to make repair possible.

Repair is more than ending an argument. Two people can stop fighting without anything having been repaired. Silence may return, routines may resume, and affection may gradually reappear, while the underlying injury remains untouched. Repair requires some recognition of what happened between us and what the experience was like for the other person.

This does not necessarily mean agreeing on every detail. It does mean becoming capable of saying, "I can see how my response affected you, even though that was not what I intended." Intention matters, but it does not erase impact. One of the humbling demands of love is accepting that we may have wounded someone without meaning to and that explaining ourselves is not always the same as understanding them.

A sincere apology, therefore, involves more than admitting a technical fault. It requires temporarily loosening our grip on our own innocence. We must resist the immediate impulse to explain why we acted as we did, identify what the other person did first, or insist that they have misunderstood us. Those things may eventually deserve discussion, but repair often begins by allowing the other person’s pain to exist without immediately placing it on trial.

At the same time, repair cannot require one person to erase themselves to preserve the relationship. Accountability is not submission, and empathy does not mean accepting every accusation as true. Mature repair allows both experiences to remain present. I can recognize that I hurt you while also remaining a person with my own limits, intentions, and understanding of what occurred.

When repair happens repeatedly, trust takes on a different meaning. Trust is no longer the belief that the other person will never disappoint us. It becomes confidence that disappointment does not always have to mean abandonment, retaliation, or permanent distance. We begin to know that the relationship can survive contact with the truth.

Becoming Good Enough

Donald Winnicott famously wrote about the “good enough” mother, reminding us that children do not require perfect parents to flourish. I have often wondered if something similar is true of intimate relationships. Perhaps we have spent too much time searching for perfect love when what we actually need is a relationship that is good enough. Good enough not because we lower our standards or settle for less than we deserve, but because we finally recognize that another human being could never carry the impossible task of fulfilling every longing we have ever known. There is something strangely relaxing about letting go of perfection. It allows us to appreciate another person for who they are rather than quietly measuring them against someone who has never existed.

“Good enough” can easily be misunderstood. It does not mean remaining in a relationship marked by cruelty, chronic neglect, dishonesty, or an unwillingness to take responsibility. Nor does it mean pretending that our deepest needs do not matter. A good-enough relationship must still contain care, responsiveness, safety, mutuality, and the possibility of growth.

What it relinquishes is not the expectation of being treated well, but the expectation of being loved without frustration. A good-enough partner will sometimes fail to understand us. They may not always respond at the moment or in the manner we desire. They will bring limitations that no amount of communication can entirely remove, just as we will bring limitations of our own.

Perhaps an equally difficult task is accepting that we, too, can only be good enough. Many of us move rapidly between imagining ourselves as the loving, reasonable partner and fearing that we are fundamentally incapable of relationship. Both positions protect us from the more ordinary truth. We are capable of tenderness and selfishness, courage and avoidance, generosity and defensiveness. We will sometimes love well, and sometimes fail the person we most want to love.

The hope of a relationship is not that either person becomes flawless. It is that both become increasingly able to recognize their failures, remain present to their consequences, and continue growing beyond the protections that once seemed necessary.

The Work of Loving Another Person

This does not make love less romantic. If anything, it makes it more so. There is something remarkably moving about two people who continue turning toward one another while fully aware of each other’s imperfections. To remain open after disappointment, to continue becoming curious when certainty would be easier, to allow oneself to be known despite the risk of being misunderstood—these are not signs that love has become ordinary. They may be among its deepest expressions.

The romance is no longer located only in finding someone who seems to answer every longing. It is found in the far less glamorous decision to remain awake to the person who is actually there. It is found in learning when our disappointment belongs to the present and when it carries the burden of the past. It is found in recognizing when we are asking to be understood while refusing to make ourselves understandable.

For all of our talk about finding the right person, I suspect the greater challenge has always been becoming someone capable of loving another imperfect human being while allowing ourselves to be loved in return. That work is rarely dramatic. Most days it looks surprisingly ordinary. It happens in apologies offered without a defensive attitude, in conversations we would rather avoid, in choosing to ask one more question before assuming we already know the answer, and in recognizing that the person beside us is still, after all these years, someone whose inner world remains worthy of our curiosity.

It also happens in the willingness to let another person matter without making them responsible for our wholeness. We can ask for comfort without demanding that we never feel alone. We can long to be known without expecting to be understood perfectly. We can depend on someone while recognizing that no relationship can protect us from every uncertainty, loss, or disappointment that comes with being alive.

Perhaps that is what love has been asking of us all along.