When I Stopped Repairing Relationships by Myself

Lately I’ve been sitting with a sentence that keeps repeating itself in different forms, offered as advice, framed as wisdom, delivered with certainty: relationships are supposed to be reciprocal. Equal effort. Match energy. Don’t over-give. Meet people where they are, even if that means stepping back, going quiet, or cutting contact altogether. On the surface, none of that sounds unreasonable. It makes intuitive sense. And yet the more I’ve tried to apply it cleanly, the more something in me resists—not because I think reciprocity is wrong, but because the way it’s often explained feels incomplete. Too tidy. Too abstract. As if relationships exist in a vacuum, untouched by illness, trauma, poverty, disability, grief, burnout, or the simple fact that being alive right now is exhausting for a lot of people.

What makes this hard is that I believe two things at the same time. I believe people have real limits. And I believe I’ve been carrying too much for too long.

This piece has a companion playlist, made up entirely of my own songs, arranged to follow the emotional arc described here — from denial and over-functioning, through rupture and grief, and into the quieter ground that comes after I stop repairing relationships by myself. It isn’t a soundtrack in the background so much as a parallel process: the nervous system before words, the questions that repeat, the moment effort runs out, and the steadier presence that follows. You don’t need to listen straight through, or at all — but if you do, it’s meant to be experienced slowly, without shuffling, the same way this realization unfolded for me. You can listen to previews of the songs here, or click through to listen to the full playlist below.

I don’t think relationships need to be equal at every moment. I don’t think love is a spreadsheet or a stopwatch. People go through seasons where they simply cannot show up the way they want to, or the way they once did. I know that firsthand. There are days when getting out of bed takes everything I have. Days when my capacity is borrowed time. Days when I am functioning because I have no other option. Grace matters. Context matters. Compassion matters. I will never believe that we owe each other perfection.

But I’m also starting to see something I avoided naming for a long time: there is a difference between supporting someone through a low-capacity season and quietly carrying an entire relationship indefinitely. There is a difference between unevenness and imbalance. There is a difference between patience and self-abandonment.

In most of my relationships—friendships, romantic connections, even long-term partnerships—I have been the one initiating more often than not. I’m the one who reaches out after silence. The one who reopens conversations. The one who checks in. The one who asks how they’re doing, remembers what’s going on in their lives, and tries to hold the emotional thread when it starts to fray. Reliability has been inconsistent, depending on the person. Responses to things that matter deeply to me—writing I’ve poured myself into, music that carries pieces of my interior world—are often minimal or nonexistent. And when communication breaks down or disappears for long stretches, very few people acknowledge it. Fewer still repair it. Most simply resume as if nothing happened, as if the gap never existed.

In crisis, almost no one is available.

It took me a long time to admit how much that hurts, because I kept explaining it away. They’re busy. They’re overwhelmed. They’re dealing with their own lives. All of that can be true. But over time, I noticed the cost of constantly being the one to understand, to accommodate, to compensate. I noticed how much energy it took just to keep connections from dissolving. I noticed how often my nervous system stayed on edge, waiting, wondering, replaying silence, trying to decide whether to reach out again or finally stop. And I noticed how much of my sense of worth became entangled with whether I was actively maintaining contact—like the relationship only existed when I was performing for it.

The hardest part, I’ve realized, isn’t the silence itself. It’s the silence without repair. A delayed response is human. A long gap can be understandable. But when communication resumes with no acknowledgment, no “sorry I disappeared,” no recognition that time passed and something might have been felt on the other side, it sends a quiet but powerful message: this connection doesn’t require care. Or worse, that it only requires care from one direction.

Without repair, I’m left holding questions I never asked to carry. Did I matter? Was I forgotten? Am I asking for too much? Am I imagining the gap? And when this happens repeatedly, across multiple relationships, it doesn’t just create sadness—it creates instability. A kind of relational vertigo where I don’t know where I stand unless I’m actively proving my presence.

I used to tell myself that this was just the price of being someone who feels deeply. Or someone who reaches out. Or someone who refuses to become hardened. I told myself that if I just kept showing up, kept offering patience, kept being the understanding one, eventually things would even out. But what actually happened was quieter and more corrosive: I started shrinking my needs to fit the space people were willing to give. I stopped expecting repair. I stopped asking for acknowledgment. I started pre-emptively lowering my expectations so I wouldn’t feel disappointed. And over time, that didn’t make me more compassionate. It made me smaller.

There is something particularly destabilizing about being the only one who names rupture. When you’re the only one who notices the distance, who feels the absence, who wonders whether something needs to be addressed, it starts to feel like you’re imagining the problem. Like you’re “too sensitive.” Like wanting clarity is a flaw. And yet clarity is not excess. It’s basic relational oxygen. Without it, connection becomes conditional on silence.

What I’m slowly learning—awkwardly, imperfectly, with grief attached—is that reciprocity isn’t about keeping score. It’s about sustainability. It’s about whether a relationship can exist without one person constantly propping it up. It’s about whether there is any evidence, over time, that the other person will sometimes reach back, initiate, or repair without being prompted. Not always. Not perfectly. Just sometimes. Enough to know the connection is shared.

This is where the advice I’ve been given starts to make more sense, once it’s stripped of its absolutism. “Meet people where they are” doesn’t have to mean disappearing yourself to accommodate them. It can mean adjusting how much you invest based on what’s actually mutual. It can mean allowing relationships to become lighter, quieter, or more distant when that’s what the other person’s capacity truly allows—without treating that distance as a personal failure you need to fix.

And yes, that can be lonely.

There’s no version of this that doesn’t come with loss. When you stop over-functioning, some connections don’t survive the absence of your effort. Some conversations never restart. Some people don’t notice you’ve stepped back at all. That hurts in a very specific way. It forces you to confront the possibility that the closeness you felt existed largely because you kept it alive.

But I’m beginning to understand that proximity maintained through self-abandonment isn’t real closeness. It’s endurance. It’s habit. It’s fear of being alone dressed up as loyalty.

I’m not interested in cutting people off harshly or punishing anyone for having limits. This isn’t about ultimatums or moral judgments. It’s about boundaries that protect my capacity to stay human. I’m learning to stop initiating endlessly. To stop repairing alone. To stop explaining my absence when I finally match the level of engagement I’ve been receiving all along. Not as a test. Not as a strategy. Just as honesty.

What remains after that honesty may be quieter. It may be smaller. It may feel emptier at first. But it will also be truer.

The people who are meant to stay won’t require me to disappear to keep them. They won’t be perfect. They’ll miss messages. They’ll get overwhelmed. They’ll go quiet sometimes. But there will be some initiation. Some acknowledgment. Some repair. Some signal—however small—that the connection exists independently of my effort.

I don’t think reciprocity is about demanding more from people who don’t have it to give. I think it’s about accepting what’s actually being offered, and then choosing accordingly. Letting go of the fantasy of what a relationship could be if I just tried harder. Letting go of the role of emotional caretaker where it isn’t reciprocated. Letting myself rest.

I also know this boundary only works if I don’t replace over-functioning with suspicion. Part of what I’m learning is to trust people who do tell me they’ll be gone for a while — who name their limits clearly, who say they’re stepping back, offline, or unavailable, and who ask for patience honestly instead of disappearing without explanation. That trust doesn’t come easily to me. Silence has taught me to brace for loss. But I’m trying to let clear communication mean something again. I’m practicing believing that when someone says they’ll be back, they mean it — even if the waiting is uncomfortable, even if my instinct is to prepare for abandonment. This is the harder work for me: not chasing, not repairing, but staying present without grasping, and allowing space without assuming it’s the end.

This is not a declaration that I’m done with people. It’s an admission that I’m done being the only proof a relationship exists.

I don’t have final answers. I’m still learning where my limits are. I’m still unlearning the belief that my worth is measured by how much I can carry for others. I’m still sitting with the discomfort of quieter inboxes and unanswered messages and the strange grief that comes with not reaching out again. But for the first time in a long while, I’m also curious. Curious about who remains when I stop filling every silence. Curious about what it feels like to be met without chasing. Curious about whether the right connections will feel less like effort and more like presence.

If this isolates me a little, so be it. Loneliness born of honesty is still more livable than connection built on self-erasure. And I’m finally ready to see what grows in the space where I stop doing all the work.

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The follow-up to this blog post is out now, click below to read it.

Click to read "When Intensity Isn’t Capacity"