Dear Reader, 
Quick favour, please put on your headphones and play Eternity by Alex Warren while you read.

It’s heartbreaking.

Not everyone will understand the way we love — and even fewer will understand what it takes for me to translate that love into a language they can feel.

Some of us weren’t  taught to love out loud. We didn’t grow up with loud declarations or overflowing affection. Love, for me, was quiet. It was sacrifice. It was subtle. It was folding someone’s clothes before they asked. It was remembering how they liked their food, checking in between long days, holding back my own pain to make space for theirs. 

That’s the kind of love I carry, not flashy, not poetic, but present in the shadows, steady in the background. I’ve always had to stretch myself, not just emotionally, but physically and mentally, to show up for the people I care about. 

My life is layered with responsibility. With dreams that demand everything. With a future I’m actively building while no one sees the cost. But no matter how much I give, it still hurts when the people I love look at me and question if I ever did.

If I ever meant it.
If I ever tried.

It hurts when they say: “You claim to love me…”like it’s an accusation. Like my love has to prove itself in someone else’s language to be real.

It means I care so much, I try to offer whatever pieces of me I can, even when I’m running on fumes.

Recently, a connection that reminded me just how much love languages matter. Theirs was about presence. Constant meet ups. Sharing space. Feeling close. Mine? Mine lived in the cracks of my tired days, a message sent before sleep, a quick call squeezed between obligations, asking how they were even when my own chest was heavy with silence.

I couldn’t always be there physically, but I tried to be there emotionally. And in my world, that was a big thing. That was love.

But love like mine is easy to overlook. Because it doesn’t always come wrapped in the way people want. They compromised more than they should have. And I won’t pretend I didn’t feel the weight of that. I watched them slip away slowly, like a quiet goodbye that hadn’t been spoken yet. I didn’t blame them. We were both giving different things, both holding different versions of love, and mine, sadly, wasn’t enough to feel held.

That’s the grief no one talks about.

Sometimes, love isn’t absent, it’s just lost in translation. We give what we know. What we’ve been taught. What we have the capacity for. And when it doesn’t match what the other person needs, it creates a loneliness neither of us can fix.

That’s a grief of its own.

Now I know not everyone will understand. Not everyone will see that the message left unread was me re-reading it for hours, unable to come up with a reply because it touched my entire being. That the canceled plan wasn’t avoidance, it was burnout. That the silence wasn’t distance, it was me, trying to survive my own life.

And maybe that’s the hardest part.

To know you loved someone in every quiet way you knew how and they still walked away thinking you didn’t love them at all.

And maybe the most painful part of it all…
is knowing I loved. Fully. Bravely.

Even in the small, tired ways no one else noticed.
Even the one that I bled to give.

The silence that felt empty but  God knows it was full of everything I didn’t know how to say.

I wonder if one day they’ll remember me —
not in the loud moments,
not in the arguments,
but in the stillness.

like a heart that gave too much in a language no one ever bothered to learn.

So if another heart ever has to doubt my love, I hope they know I did. 

God, I did.