I had three conversations this week. Different women. Different relationships. But each, in her own way, trying to figure out why the love she wants feels so hard to reach.
I heard frustration. Impatience. Defensiveness. Resentment. A longing for more affection, more intimacy, more of the sense that you’re in this together.
And under their words, I heard the drumbeat of:
I want to feel close to you.
I want you to understand me.
I want to know that I matter to you.
How often does that longing gets lost in the struggle to have it met?
Not feeling seen hurts. Trying to explain ourselves while still not feeling understood deepens that hurt. And when the person we most want to reach seems unable to meet us, we can reach for the very defenses that keep us apart.
Impatient, we keep score. Reach for the “you never” and “you always.” Blame, withdraw, or start imagining escape routes. We might even become so determined to have our hurt acknowledged that the connection we were hoping to create gets lost.
It’s a particular kind of hell: wanting closeness while repeatedly slipping into the very dance that creates distance.
I know something about that dance myself.
I love you right there.
Back in 2009 while at the School of Womanly Arts I first heard this sentence. I began saying it to myself, particularly when deep into self-loathing.
“I love you right there.”
Not once you’ve figured it out. Not after you’ve calmed down or become a better version of yourself.
Right there.
Later, I experienced something that brought those words to life in a different way. My now-husband met me in one of those moments without trying to fix or coax me into feeling differently. He didn’t need me to get myself “together” before being present.
He was simply there.
That experience helped me grow my capacity to trust, surrender, and receive. To discover that I could be met without first having to change who I was or what was happening inside me.
I think about that when I hear the stories people bring to me. People who have done the work, recognize their patterns, genuinely want to do things differently. And yet, when the stakes are high and the person they love isn’t responding as they hope, they slip back into same old dance.
We can know ourselves quite well and still find ourselves caught in familiar pattrns.
Feeling dismissed, our frustration comes out as criticism. Longing for more affection, we become impatient and snarky. Disappointed yet again, we erect our defenses.
The longing is real. So is the hurt.
And our efforts to protect ourselves from the pain of not being met, we create the exact conditions that make connection harder to find.
These are the barriers to love I explore in my book, Unbreakable Us: Removing the Barriers to Love – the patterns we develop to protect ourselves that can outlive the circumstances that first gave rise to them.
We carry them into the conversations we most want to go well. Into the moments when a little tenderness might bring us closer (but old hurt makes us brace for disappointment.) Into the relationships where being misunderstood feels like so much more than a misunderstanding.
As I often share with my clients, we are 100% responsible for 50% of the relationship. And we can begin by becoming curious about what happens inside us when we don’t feel seen.
What am I longing for right now?
To be understood? To know that my feelings matter? To feel that we’re on the same side?
And what happens to me when I fear I won’t?
Exploring these questions are an act of personal responsibility. An invitation to pause long enough to notice what lies beneath the familiar reaction, before the argument, the blame, or the retreat takes over.
Because being met isn’t the same as being fixed. It isn’t even the same as being agreed with.
Sometimes it means having someone stay present with our experience without immediately correcting, explaining, or trying to make it go away.
Or allowing ourselves to be seen in a moment when we’re not particularly proud of who we’re being.
And sometimes it means discovering that we can offer another person that same presence without abandoning our own needs or excusing hurtful behavior. We can make room for a human being whose experience may be different from ours without losing sight of our own.
“I love you right there.”
What might become possible if we could meet ourselves and one another with a little less fixing and a little more curiosity? If we could listen without preparing our defense, speak without needing to prove our case, or allow a moment of discomfort without deciding what it means about the future of the relationship?
I don’t imagine this means every difficult conversation will end in understanding. Or that every relationship can become what we hope it will be.
But I do wonder what changes when we stop treating every moment of disconnection as evidence that something is wrong with us, with the other person, or with the relationship itself.
What if, sometimes, it could be an invitation to see something we haven’t seen before?
Perhaps the next step isn’t to try harder.
It’s to stay. To listen. To become a little more willing to be present with what is actually happening, rather than rushing to fix it, defend against it, or find our way out.
To remember that beneath the frustration, the resentment, and the longing to be right, there is often a person who wants to know that they matter.
A person who wants to be met.
Including you.
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I’m Joëlle Lydon — author of Unbreakable Us, artist, and relationship guide.
I help people create better intimacy by removing the barriers that keep them from it.
I envision a world where relationship is no longer an unconscious pattern we repeat, but a conscious partnership we create—one where ease, trust, and peace can emerge from how we show up for one another.