It’s when someone wants you and cares about you, but they can’t. This is one of the hardest situations in relationships. Because you can see that the problem isn’t indifference. You see it when they look at you, when they show you tenderness, when you pull away and they tell you, “I missed you.” That’s why it confuses you so much.
Because someone can care about you and still not be able to. They may not have the capacity to love you consistently, long-term, in a way that makes you feel safe, in a way that allows you to relax and let go because you know they’ll be there.
Yes, they can care about you and still not be able to.
They care, but:
- They pull away or shut down when you open up.
- They avoid difficult conversations.
- They shut down when there is too much emotion in the room.
- They become defensive when you express pain or a need, interpreting it as an attack or accusation.
- They disappear instead of sitting down and repairing the rupture.
So you’re left holding two truths:
“They love me, but they can’t give me the love I need.”
It doesn’t mean the feelings aren’t there.
But that person may only be able to be there for you in the happy moments, when the atmosphere is light. When you’re smiling, when you’re your pleasant, easygoing self, when you’re not asking for anything difficult or “too much.” When you don’t have many demands, when being with you is easy and convenient.
Not when you’re silent. Not when you’re hurting. Not when you need them to be present in the difficult, uncomfortable moment. Not when change needs to happen.
It doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. Truly, they may care about you deeply. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they have the skills, self-awareness and emotional maturity needed for a healthy relationship to thrive and be sustained.
It’s much easier to love someone in the good moments. Much harder to remain there in the not-so-good ones.
What destroys us:
The hardest relationships, the ones that destroy us the most when they end, aren’t the ones where there is no love. They’re the ones where there is love, but there is no capacity. There isn’t the ability for one person to tolerate difficult emotions and the transformative work that needs to happen within a relationship for it to work and evolve.
But because there is love, you see glimpses of the potential. Of what you could have, if only the other person could. You see the good days, the care, the effort, the tenderness, the embrace, the right words they sometimes say, and which mean everything to you. But they don’t last.
Those moments when you almost have it.
And you hope that from now on, this will be your everyday reality.
But it isn’t.
Love matters, but love alone isn’t enough. It also requires the courage to be vulnerable, accountability, repair, consistency, consistency, consistency.
Because they may care about you and love you, but they may not be able to love you in the way you need to be loved.
The tragedy of relationships is that someone can genuinely have feelings for you and still not have the capacity to choose you. These two things can coexist in the same person, and that’s what makes being involved with emotionally unavailable people so painful.
Were they “selling” you a future they never intended to give you? Maybe. But future faking implies a degree of conscious deception: someone presenting you with a future they know they have no intention of creating with you. But they may genuinely have believed everything they were telling you at the moment they were saying it. And that is actually a very common, if more complicated, version of what happens.
They may have loved you. Or they may have believed they loved you. But feelings aren’t enough. Love is a daily choice and a daily action.
And one of the hardest lessons in love is learning to stop evaluating people based on the intensity of their feelings and start evaluating them based on the clarity of their choices.
They may love you. They may miss you. But that isn’t enough. And so you grieve something that may have been emotionally real, but was never truly available as a relationship.
Because sometimes the most dangerous relationships aren’t the ones in which nothing was real. They’re the ones in which enough things were real for you to keep hoping.
And at some point, you have to stop asking:
“Did they really love me?”
The answer may be yes.
But the better question is:
“Were they actually willing and able to build a life with me?”
Believe the answer they give you with their life, not the one they occasionally send you in a message.
If you want to talk about what’s happening in your new relationship or dating situation, and how you can change the dynamics in the way you communicate with each other, so that the dynamic itself can change, I can help. Fill out the form and I’ll get in touch with you shortly.
Note on capacity
The text is written as though men are the only ones who lack capacity, even though that obviously isn’t true. However, it is true that the way men are raised within patriarchy can prevent them from developing emotional range and emotional resilience — meaning the ability to tolerate emotions, and therefore how much they are able to give and “hold” emotionally.