Let It Fall Apart, Or Let It Be Real

There's a thought that keeps so many relationships holding their shape long after the shape has stopped being true.

The thought goes something like this: if I stop reaching, if I stop bridging the gap, if I stop being the one who softens and adjusts and holds the whole thing together, it will all fall apart.

So you keep reaching. You play the role your partner needs someone to play. You become the regulated one, the flexible one, the one who understands, the one who doesn't ask for too much because too much might be the thing that breaks it.

Sometimes what you're really holding onto isn't the person in front of you at all. It's their potential. Who they could become, who you know they have it in them to be, if only they tried a little harder, understood a little deeper, met you a little further along. And that's a hard thread to lean your whole weight on, because potential isn't a person. It's a future that hasn't arrived.

And the person in front of you feels it.

They feel you loving who they might become more than who they actually are right now. So they're always grasping for more, always just short of the mark, never quite good enough for the version of them you're waiting for. You become the one pointing at the goalposts, telling them where they're falling short and how to close the distance. It looks like encouragement. It can feel like love. But underneath it, it's a kind of harm, quiet and constant, because nobody gets to just be met as they actually are.

It has a shape, this dynamic, and once you see it you can't unsee it.

You reach, because the gap feels too big to leave open.

You perform the missing piece, becoming whatever the relationship seems to need to keep breathing.

The performing gets mistaken, by both of you, for how things actually are.

And underneath that mistake, quietly, resentment starts collecting, because you're the only one who knows how much you're carrying.

Then you reach again, a little further this time, because stopping now would mean everything you've built on top of the performing has to be looked at honestly.

And so it repeats, each round asking a little more of you and revealing a little less of them.

That's what the reaching costs.

If you are playing the role your relationship needs in order to survive, you're never giving your partner the chance to actually show you who they are, or who they aren't.

You got there first, filled the gap with hope, and stayed there so long they never had to arrive as themselves.

I don't come into this work trying to make sure people get back together.

That was never the job.

What I care about, with every couple and every polycule that sits in front of me, is honesty. Not the honesty of who did what wrong, but the deeper kind, the honesty of what is actually here, right now, and what each person is genuinely willing to offer from that place, not the place they might grow into one day.

So let go of the reaching.

Surrender to what actually is, not what you're working so hard to make it become. And from that place, witness. Witness their words. Witness their actions. Witness whether the two of them agree with each other, or whether you've been quietly filling the gap between what someone says and what someone does, calling that gap hope.

You cannot fix another person. You cannot hand them the code that unlocks their own growth, no matter how clearly you can see it, no matter how much it would ease things if they'd just take the shortcut you're offering. They have to find their own way there, on their own timeline, through their own steps, or not at all. That was never yours to walk for them.

Because it's here, in the honest now, not the hoped-for future, that real connection actually becomes possible. It's in the present moment, stripped of performing and potential and pointing at goalposts, that two people can actually meet each other. That's where a secure bond gets built, not on the story of who you're both becoming, but on the truth of who you actually are together right now.

And once you're standing there, honestly, you can step in whatever direction the relationship actually calls for.

Toward each other.

Away from each other.

Into something neither of you expected.

But at least it's a real direction, not a performed one.

That might mean it falls apart. It might also mean, for the first time, two people get to meet each other honestly enough to build something that can actually hold.

Come home to yourself first.

Meet the one in front of you, honestly, in the now.

With love,

Narla