Did I ever actually love him?

[From my diary]January 5, 2023I often think I never loved him.Because I simply do not know what love is. In the past, I fell in love with men that did not even look in my direction. I missed them badly, dreamt about having them on my side, invented signs that they apparently gave me to confirm my guesses.I did not know how to deal with men who actually invited me for a date. Usually, a date was a mess, and I never saw the man again.I wonder how it even developed into a marriage. Was it love or just some “match”?Many people who grew up without a clear model of mutual love confuse longing for love itself. Unrequited crushes feel intense and recognizable; reciprocated affection feels foreign and uncomfortable. When such a person — like myself — eventually does settle into a long-term relationship, they often spend years wondering whether what they had was love or simply a workable match. Both psychology and attachment research suggest the answer is rarely either-or.Why longing can feel more like love than love doesThere is a quiet pattern in many people’s romantic histories that goes something like this: the strongest feelings are reserved for people who are not really there. The crush from afar. The man who was friendly once but never followed up. The relationship that ended badly but somehow still occupies the most space in your imagination. Meanwhile, the people who actually want to be in your life — who call when they say they will, who turn up, who are available — feel oddly muted by comparison. Sometimes even uncomfortable.Psychologists sometimes describe this as a feature of avoidant or anxious attachment patterns. The intense longing for someone unavailable is not really love. It is the nervous system staying activated — alert, hopeful, slightly painful — in the way it learned to be activated early in life. Reciprocated affection, by contrast, requires a quieter kind of nervous system: one that can sit with closeness without escalating it into either panic or pursuit. If you grew up without much practice at that quieter state, it can feel like nothing is happening when in fact something real is.This is why people often describe their first stable relationship as confusing. Where is the rush? Where is the missing? Why am I not consumed? The absence of those familiar signals can be misread as the absence of love itself.What "match" actually meansThe question in my diary — was it love or just some match? — assumes the two are different. They may not be, or at least not in the way we tend to think.A long-term relationship that works is, in part, a successful match: compatible rhythms, complementary tolerances, a shared sense of how to spend a Sunday. Researchers studying long-term partnerships often find that the couples who stay together are not necessarily the ones who started with the most intensity, but the ones whose daily lives fit together without constant friction. Love, in this view, is partly a capacity and partly a circumstance — what you bring, and what the relationship lets you build.That doesn’t mean a match without feeling is enough. But it does mean that the absence of the dramatic, longing-shaped feeling you knew from your unrequited crushes is not evidence of an absence of love. It might just be evidence that you were, for once, in something that did not require longing to sustain itself.What it doesn't meanIt does not mean the marriage was faked, or that the husband was simply a stand-in for a feeling that could not be had elsewhere. It does not mean every quiet relationship is secretly love and every intense one is secretly not. The question of whether the love was real is itself real, and worth asking, and probably cannot be answered in a single direction.Illustration has been kindly provided by Supportive Stranger AppWhat it might mean is that the categories available for sorting these feelings were not built for what was actually happening. There was a category for longing and a category for messy date that doesn't repeat. There may not have been a category for the long, undramatic, sometimes lonely closeness of a marriage that mostly works until it does not. Without the right category, an experience can feel like nothing — even when it was something.The useful question, looking back, is not did I love him? It is What did I have, and what would I have needed in order to recognize it as love?How a person learns to recognize love when it is finally not painful — that is a longer story, and one for another post.A note on the ideas behind this postA note on what I drew from for this one, in case you want to add it to the further-reading section over time:* Attachment theory (John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and later Sue Johnson, Amir Levine, Phillip Shaver): the framework underneath the “anxious vs. secure” language. Levine and Heller’s Attached is the popular-audience version most readers will have encountered.* The idea that the nervous system mistakes activation for love: this is a common claim in trauma-informed therapy writing (Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges and polyvagal theory). I phrased it more carefully than some popularizations do.* Long-term partnership research (the Gottman Institute, plus large longitudinal studies like the Harvard Study of Adult Development): the finding that lasting couples are characterized by daily-life fit and repair rather than peak intensity.I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger, a small iOS app for journaling through difficult moments — where you write, a supportive stranger draws a quick visual (like the one in the post), and you decide whether to keep the scene or let it go. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit divorcedme.substack.com