When Intensity Isn’t Capacity

I keep landing here, and it would be convenient—comforting, even—if I could reduce it to a single cause. If I could pin it to one trauma, one diagnosis, one unlucky streak of “the wrong people,” and then feel like the solution is obvious: stop doing the thing that leads to this place. But the problem with convenient stories is that they’re usually designed to protect us from the more brutal truth, which is that patterns don’t repeat because we’re stupid. They repeat because something inside us is trying to survive. Something inside us learned a long time ago that love is a scarce resource, that connection is a door that closes without warning, that if you don’t move fast you’ll miss your chance, and if you do move fast you’ll be told you were moving “too fast” in the first place. And if you’re like me—if your love is big and verbal and unhidden—you eventually find yourself staring at familiar scorch marks and thinking, again, ‘How did I get back here?’

I don’t think I fall in love too easily because I’m shallow. I think I fall in love too easily because when I finally feel safe enough to love, my entire system treats it like oxygen. Not in the melodramatic “I’ll die without you” way—no, that’s not what I mean, and I don’t want any part of that narrative—but in the very literal, nervous-system sense of: Oh. There you are. A kind of connection where I feel seen. A kind of closeness that doesn’t flinch at my intensity. A kind of closeness where clarity isn’t a trap—where I don’t have to decode riddles or pay a price for asking direct questions. And then my brain does what brains do: it tries to build a home out of that feeling. Quickly. Because it knows what it feels like when the power goes out, and it doesn’t want to be in the dark again. So it starts laying bricks the moment it finds warmth. It starts building a hearth around a flame that might still be a match.

And here’s the part that is hard to admit without sounding like I’m flattering myself or turning this into a martyr story, so let me be careful: I think the way I love can be intoxicating to certain people. Not because I’m magical. Not because I’m superior. Not because I’m some rare creature walking the earth surrounded by fog and violin music. But because there are people who have spent their whole lives starving in plain sight. People who are carrying a private, aching story that says: I am not enough. I will be left. If I am truly known, I will be rejected. And then they experience a kind of care that doesn’t just say ‘I like you’—it shows up—with attention, with language, with presence, with the kind of devotion that isn’t performative. The kind of devotion that isn’t trying to buy anything. The kind of devotion that feels like safety: ‘I’m here. I see you. You don’t have to audition.’ That kind of love hits a wounded person like sunlight hits a basement. It doesn’t just feel good. It feels unreal. It feels like rescue.

Except here’s the trap: rescue is not the same thing as relationship. And in rescue mode (even unconsciously), some people aren’t choosing relationship yet—they’re choosing relief. They’re choosing what a steady presence regulates in them. They’re choosing the nervous-system hush. They’re choosing the fantasy of being held without having to learn how to hold back. They’re choosing the feeling of being wanted without having to tolerate the vulnerability of being seen wanting. And I don’t say that with contempt. I say it with a kind of grief, because I understand it. I understand the urge to cling to warmth and call it home. I understand the desperation to make a moment permanent. I understand the impulse to say big things because big things feel safer than small ones. Small ones require time. Small ones require consistency. Small ones require the daily, unromantic work of being a person.

So the cycle starts. It starts with intensity because intensity is easy when you’re running on adrenaline and fantasy and relief. Intensity is easy in the early glow of a new connection, when you’re trading vulnerability like gifts, when tenderness comes fast and the body mistakes speed for intimacy. Intensity is easy when the stakes are still theoretical. When you can say “always” and it feels like poetry rather than a promise you’ll actually have to keep. And for a while, it works. For a while, it feels like you’ve finally found the thing you’ve been looking for: a connection that doesn’t seem afraid of your love—one that feels like it’s speaking the same emotional language.

And then reality arrives, as it always does. Reality is the part where the nervous system has to pay the bill for all that adrenaline. Reality is the part where consistency is required. Reality is the part where “I love you” stops being a fireworks display and becomes a commitment to how you treat each other on the days when nothing is happening. Reality is where your love becomes a mirror. Not a flattering mirror. A mirror that reflects back the parts of someone they have been running from. Their fear of being chosen. Their fear of being relied on. Their fear of being good and still failing. Their fear that if they let this become real, they’ll lose it—and the pain of loss will be worse than if they just burn it down now.

That’s where the shift can happen. That’s where warmth can turn brittle. And if you’ve never lived through this pattern, the shift feels like a break in reality. It feels like you must have missed something. It feels like there’s a secret conversation you weren’t invited to. It feels like you stepped off a curb and the sidewalk moved. One moment, closeness feels mutual—being told you’re wanted, being told you’re safe, being told you’re the exception—and the next, you’re being told it’s “too much,” or it’s “not enough,” or it’s “not right,” or it “never was,” and suddenly the story of the past changes to make distance feel necessary. And the worst part is that the person saying it may actually believe it in that moment. Not because it’s true, but because emotional overwhelm has a way of turning temporary feelings into universal laws. When someone is flooded, “I’m scared” becomes “I can’t.” “I need a break” becomes “We’re done.” ‘I don’t know how to do this’ can start sounding like a verdict—when it’s really just panic talking. It’s not logic. It’s survival.

And then my brain does the thing that makes this pattern extra dangerous for me: it tries to repair. It tries to find the missing lever. It tries to find the sentence that will bring steadiness back into the room. It tries to become the perfect translator, the perfect comforter, the perfect reassurance. Not because I want to control them, but because I want to restore reality. I want to restore continuity. I want to believe that love is something you can talk through, something you can hold gently until the panic passes, something you can protect from the worst impulses of fear. And sometimes, it works—briefly. Sometimes things settle. Sometimes there’s an apology. Sometimes there’s a return to warmth, overwhelm gets named. Fear gets admitted. Capacity gets discussed. And for a moment, relief floods back in. The lights turn on again. The match becomes a flame again. The home starts rebuilding itself.

But the nervous system remembers. Mine, especially. Mine keeps receipts. Mine does not forget the moment the ground fell out. Mine does not forget the way closeness can appear and then disappear in a way my body experiences as punishment, even if no punishment was intended. Mine does not forget how quickly “I want you” became “I can’t.” And because my love is earnest, because my love is direct, because my love doesn’t enjoy games, I start to feel like I’m living beside a cliff. I start to speak carefully. I start to brace. I start to check the weather constantly. I start to wonder if any sentence I say will trigger the next collapse. I start to shrink—not because someone asked me to, but because my system is trying to prevent another fall. And that is where the pattern becomes not just painful but unsafe. Because the moment I start shaping my entire self around avoiding someone else’s panic, I’m no longer in a relationship. I’m in a hazard zone.

This is the part I wish more people understood about “anxious attachment” and all the dismissive advice that gets thrown around like it’s wisdom. “You need to be okay alone.” “You need to stop needing people.” “You need to self-soothe.” And yes, self-soothing is real. Yes, building internal stability matters. Yes, nobody should be someone else’s only support beam. I agree with all of that. But there is a difference between learning to regulate your nervous system and pretending you don’t have one. There is a difference between “I can be alone” and “I can tolerate being repeatedly dropped.” There is a difference between being resilient and being trained to accept inconsistency as normal. The goal is not to become a person who doesn’t feel abandonment. The goal is to recognize when a dynamic is becoming unsafe in slow motion.

Because here’s the truth: I don’t think my problem is that I love too much. I think my problem is that I keep trying to build a reciprocal life with people who can only offer reciprocal moments. They can meet me in the fireworks. They can meet me in the confession booth. They can meet me in the midnight voice message where the world feels unreal and anything seems possible. But when the adrenaline fades, something changes. Or the capacity shifts. Or fear takes the wheel. And I don’t say that to villainize them. I think many of them are genuinely good people who are genuinely hurting. I think many of them mean what they say when they say it. But meaning something in the moment is not the same thing as having the capacity to live it over time. And capacity matters. Capacity is the unglamorous backbone of love.

My ideology—my actual moral framework, the thing I’ve tried to build out of all my broken pieces—doesn’t let me pretend that love is just a feeling. Love, to me, is an ethical act. It is presence freely given. It is truth without cruelty. It is care without control. It is the willingness to see another person as fully human, even when they’re disappointing you. It is also the willingness to see yourself as fully human, even when your heart is begging you to sacrifice your needs just to keep someone near. If love is ethical, then it cannot require self-erasure. If love is ethical, then it cannot be built on hot and cold. If love is ethical, then it cannot ask me to repeatedly hand my nervous system to a dynamic that cannot hold it gently.

And for anyone who recognizes pieces of themselves in this kind of fear response—the shift, the withdrawal, the rewriting—please hear me: this isn’t about shaming anyone. I’m trying to interrupt the harm with the gentlest firmness I can manage: this isn’t “just how you are,” and it isn’t romantic, and it isn’t harmless. When fear turns closeness into emergency, it can start masquerading as ‘truth’ and leave scorched ground in its wake. Ethically, the work often comes down to two things: naming what’s happening, and refusing to outsource that overwhelm onto someone else’s nervous system. That can look like naming it plainly: 'I’m flooded. I’m not thinking clearly. I need to pause, and I will come back at [time/day] to talk.' It can look like resisting the urge to rewrite the entire relationship just to justify the exit. It can look like learning the difference between “I’m overwhelmed” and “you are too much.” And if you can’t do that yet—if you keep disappearing, detonating, returning, repeating—then the ethical move is not to keep chasing intensity like it’s intimacy. The ethical move is to get help: trauma work, attachment work, skills work (DBT, somatic therapy, EMDR—whatever fits), anything that teaches your body how to stay in the room without turning love into a fire drill. Because wanting warmth is human. But using people as a temporary regulator—and calling it love—will keep hurting them, and it will keep hollowing you out, too.

And this is where my imagery comes in, because I need images to understand my own internal world. I have always needed metaphors the way some people need spreadsheets. My love, when it’s healthy, is like a hearth: not a wildfire, not a performance, not a blaze that consumes everything, but a steady warmth you can return to. The dragon in me—the protector, the witness, the part of me that has teeth and fire and history—is not there to dominate anyone. It’s there to prevent me from confusing hunger with destiny. It’s there to remind me that vulnerability is not the same thing as exposure without boundaries. It’s there to keep my hands open without letting my spine become a bridge people cross and then burn behind them.

So why do I keep landing here? Because I am drawn to sincerity, and sincerity can be confused with stability. Because I respond to intensity, and intensity can be confused with commitment. Because when someone expresses that I make them feel safe, a part of me wants to believe I’ve found a place where my love makes sense. Because when someone is brave enough to say big things, it feels like honesty—and sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s a flare fired from a sinking ship. Sometimes it’s a person reaching for the nearest warmth without realizing they’re about to recoil from it. Sometimes it’s a beautiful moment that can’t survive the next morning.

And if I’m being completely honest—because you asked me to be—there’s also a part of me that has learned to equate love with pursuit. With repair. With proving. With staying when it would be reasonable to leave. With trying again. And again. And again. I don’t think I learned that because I’m romantic. I think I learned it because somewhere along the way, “being wanted” became conditional. Because I was taught, implicitly or explicitly, that my needs were “too much,” that my intensity had to be managed, that my honesty had to be softened, that my questions were inconvenient. So when someone does offer me warmth, I cling to it like it’s rare. I cling to it like the universe won’t offer it twice. And then when it becomes unstable, I interpret my own distress as a personal failing instead of as a signal that something real is happening.

This is why I keep saying—over and over, even when it’s hard—that I don’t want perfection. I want steadiness. I don’t need someone to be available 24/7. I need someone to not weaponize disappearance. I don’t need someone to never spiral. I need someone who can say, “I’m spiraling,” instead of detonating the relationship and calling it truth. I don’t need someone who never doubts themselves. I need someone who doesn’t turn their self-doubt into a verdict about my worth. I can hold a lot. I can hold human mess. I can hold fear. I can hold imperfection. What I cannot hold is a repeated cycle where closeness is followed by collapse, followed by repair, followed by collapse again—because that doesn’t just hurt. It trains my body to live in alarm. It teaches my heart to brace for loss even in love. It turns the hearth into a smoke detector.

So maybe the answer isn’t “be okay alone” in the way people like to chant it, as if human beings are meant to be islands. Maybe the answer is “be okay enough with yourself that you stop accepting unstable love as the price of connection.” Maybe the answer is learning to recognize the difference between someone who is moved by your love and someone who can actually meet it. Maybe the answer is letting my dragon stand behind me, not as a weapon, but as a witness—a reminder that my vulnerability is sacred, not disposable. That to love at all is to be vulnerable, yes… but vulnerability is not an obligation to endure whiplash. Vulnerability is a choice, and choices can be revised when the cost becomes too high.

And if this post sounds like I’m hardening, please understand: I’m not trying to become unbreakable. I’m trying to become wise. I’m trying to become the kind of person who can love without abandoning myself. The kind of person who can stay tender without staying naïve. The kind of person who can hear “I’m not enough” in someone else and not translate it into “You are not enough” in myself. The kind of person who can walk away from hot and cold without calling it failure. The kind of person who can still believe in love—and also believe in safety.

Because I do still believe in love. I believe in the kind that doesn’t need to be proven every morning. I believe in the kind that can survive a bad night without rewriting the universe. I believe in the kind that can pause instead of explode. I believe in the kind that meets you where you stand, warm and steady, and doesn’t demand you chase it across the void.

And maybe this is the quiet, unglamorous answer to how I stop landing here, similar to my earlier blog "When I Stopped Repairing Relationships by Myself": I stop mistaking intensity for information. I stop treating sincerity as proof of capacity. I stop trying to stabilize dynamics that haven’t learned how to stay in the room with themselves. When the flip happens—when warmth turns brittle, when closeness becomes emergency, when reality starts to rewrite itself—I don’t rush to repair it alone. I pause. I watch. I let behavior, not hope, tell me what’s actually being offered. And if steadiness doesn’t return—if the pattern needs adrenaline to survive—I let it go, not because it wasn’t real, but because it isn’t safe. That isn’t hardness. That’s discernment. That’s choosing not to build a home on ground that keeps collapsing under my feet.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. But that doesn’t mean I have to invest in volatility.

It just means I have to invest in what, and who, can hold the flame.