Siddharth Kumar

Those who move out of love often claim it never existed. Those who remain trapped in the crippling weight of separation believe their love is eternal. I don’t know which one is true. I don’t even know what love is.

Is love an intense desire, a constant longing for another person? Is it the act of showing up when they need you? Is it simply being present with them and feeling lighter in their presence? Is it adjustment, compromise, or sacrifice? Is it the hollow, orphaned feeling when someone leaves? Or is it nothing more than the projection of our own emotions onto someone we think we are in love with?

Maybe it is all of it. Maybe it is none of it. I don’t know.

When you are in love, the person you love becomes flawless. Their imperfections soften into quirks. Incompatibilities look temporary, solvable, and almost irrelevant. You convince yourself that effort will bridge gaps, that time will smooth rough edges, that love will eventually do the work reality refuses to.

But when you fall out of love, everything reverses. The same traits now look like red flags you were deliberately ignoring. Things you once defended now feel inexcusable. When love ends, or when you finally realise it may never have existed, and you only convinced yourself it did, what remains is assessment. Cold, unavoidable assessment.

Assessment of yourself. Assessment of how you felt. Assessment of what you gave and what you received.

Slowly, you conclude that it wasn’t worth it. It begins to feel like years of life invested in something that never had the capacity to grow. You gather the fragments of yourself and walk away from a person you once believed you loved, only to confront the unsettling possibility that you never actually did. Self-preservation takes over. It overrides sentiment, nostalgia, even guilt. Things you once thought you could never do suddenly feel natural. Your body stops responding to potential and starts responding to reality.

Many of us don’t fall in love with who a person is. We fall in love with who they could be. With their potential. But loving someone for their potential comes with expectations, and those expectations are almost always unmet. The cruel part is that the other person often has no idea that they are being loved not for who they are, but for who you imagine they might become.

You try to communicate it. You hope they will understand. You wait for internalisation, for passive change. You tell yourself that if they truly loved you, they would evolve. Sometimes they try. Sometimes they make a genuine effort. But old patterns resurface. Behaviour slips back into familiar grooves. Real change rarely comes from comfort. It comes from extremes.

Eventually, you wake up to a hard truth. The potential was never matched. And by then, something irreversible has already happened. One person enters self-preservation mode. The other enters transformation mode. The one being left behind finally tries to be the person they should have been. They try to preserve love by doing all the things they should have done earlier.

But it is always too late.

Once someone enters self-preservation, their body and emotions rewire themselves. They stop caring about potential. They arrive at this state only after a long internal war, questioning their feelings, doubting their memories, replaying moments over and over. The first step of self-preservation is a devastating realisation. Maybe they never loved the person at all. Maybe they only loved the what-ifs.

When objectivity finally cuts through and it becomes clear that the imagined future never materialised, the mind begins to rationalise everything. Every doubt becomes evidence. Every discomfort becomes proof. Without rationalisation, self-preservation cannot survive. It is a brutal mental tug-of-war between slipping back into familiarity and accepting that there is no return.

Meanwhile, the person trying to live up to the potential is already far behind. They cannot catch up. The distance is no longer temporal. It is emotional. Self-preservation hardens. It shields the person who has accepted that love never existed from any external stimulus that might challenge this conclusion. At that stage, only one thing matters. The self. Everything else is noise.

Perhaps love can only be judged in retrospect. Post facto. Only when it ends do we begin to understand whether it was love at all, or simply attachment, hope, fear, or projection wearing love’s name.

And for the person who cannot move on, the final sacrifice is letting go and convincing themselves that their love was never love to begin with, otherwise they would have made it work.